


The Ceiling Over St. Petersburg

by eech



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: A decent portion of it is happy, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Canon Compliant, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Depression, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, It isn't all sad trust me, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Post-Canon, Recovery, Rehabilitation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 08:14:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21810103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eech/pseuds/eech
Summary: He opened his eyes, and looked up to the sky. It was not blue- it was grey, and it was starting to rain. He was not in Hasetsu, he was in St. Petersburg, and his eye twitched with the force of a raindrop landing on his eyelashes.Today was Sunday, August 5th, 2018. Yuri Plisetsky was seventeen years old, and none the better for it.
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri & Yuri Plisetsky, Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov, Victor Nikiforov & Yuri Plisetsky, Yakov Feltsman & Yuri Plisetsky
Comments: 14
Kudos: 37





	1. Sunday, August 5th, 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for references to drinking and alcoholism

There was always a ceiling over St. Petersburg. Grey and impenetrable. 

Yuri’s hands shook as he pressed the off button. They did that a lot, these days- shake. _You have a vibrate function now,_ he would always joke to himself in his head. There was nothing remotely funny about it. He put his phone into his back pocket.

His breath was visible when he exhaled, and he felt nothing for it. Not like he once did, when he was younger, curling his fingers around empty air and pretending that the puff of crystallized water droplets was the smoke of a cigarette. He had only tasted cigarettes in passing at that point, on sidewalks and on his mother’s clothes. By the age of sixteen, he’d coughed up the heavy fumes of his first drag of his mother’s choice- Esse menthol- and was none the better for it. Pretending to smoke had lost its charm, yet still his fingers mimed the loose hold. He snapped his hand shut.

Sighing, he jammed his tightened fists into the pockets of his overcoat. His thumbs caressed the calluses of the thick, felted wool. It didn’t comfort him, not even in the slightest. 

_“I can’t retire, Yakov, I’m only seventeen-”_

_“I’m not saying you should retire, Yurochka. I’m saying you need to take a break. Sit out the Grand Prix Series this year, if you’re not better in four months. You’re_ sick- _”_

_“I’m not sick! I’m not!”_

_Yakov shook his head._

_“Please, Yakov,” and he couldn’t hold back the tears, “please. This is all I have.”_

_“Retire, or get better.”_

Sometimes, he would close his eyes, breathe in deep, and try and convince himself that the past year and a half had been nothing but a dream. That he was in Hasetsu again, for the first time, listening to the cry of the seagulls as he wandered around the town in search of his rinkmate. Or maybe- no, scratch that, the second time he visited Hasetsu. 

Freshly sixteen, two weeks after Worlds, Yakov had sent him off with Katsudon and Vitya to decompress for a couple of weeks. He’d spent the week before at his dedushka’s apartment in Moscow, acutely aware of how old he was getting, and trying not to be. If he could ignore the fact that his dedushka was too weak to pick him up anymore, then it would prevent it from being true. 

The third morning of his second visit to Hasetsu. That was where he wanted to be, that was the night he hoped that he could return to when he finally woke up. He would try and convince himself- _see, Yuri, the sky is there, it’s blue. Isn’t it beautiful? There, look, is the fisherman that you wave to while you sit on a piece of driftwood, knees tucked up to your chest and trying valiantly not to seem cold as the ocean breeze tangles your hair into impossible knots._

That was not the day before his life went to shit, no- that day was many more months to come. But it was the most real he’d ever felt, on that beach of Hasetsu, and it was the most real he’d ever feel again. He remembered thinking to himself that everything was okay, that everything would be fine. In a strange moment of clarity, he’d looked up to the sky, and thought: _I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Even standing at the top of the world, gold medal in hand, I was not as happy as I am now. Looking down at the world is not as good as looking up. I don’t want to be on the top, I want to stay at the ground level._

It was the day he let go. Let himself feel, wholly and truly, and yet he- stupid, stupid, stupid- didn’t savor it the way he should’ve. Because he’d been convinced that he would feel like that a lot more often, or even just _again_. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t felt that way since his third day of vacation in Hasetsu in 2017. 

He’d been too young to notice that he was growing up. 

At first, things began to shift, almost imperceptibly. But that was always how it was, growing up- one day, you’d remember how your mother used to read to you before bed, or how your father used to swing you up on his shoulders, and you’d ask when did that stop? You’d never be able to remember the last time. And that was how it had been, after those couple of weeks in Hasetsu. 

Viktor and Yuuri had stopped talking to him as often, and he didn’t even notice because he was just as busy as them. Because he’d been on top, and, forgetting his epiphany on the beach, he wanted to stay there. He didn’t register the creeping feeling of loneliness, didn’t register the slow upward tick in height, didn’t register that he cried a couple more times a week. It was all steady, plodding, a sloth crossing an empty road- the desolation, the fear of falling. He was killing himself trying to reach something he wasn’t even sure he wanted anymore. And it all felt so desperately real.

There was this one thing he’d read, once, about a man who blacked out and lived several years in a dream. Wife, kids, the works- convinced that it was all real. But then one day he took notice of a lamp in his living room, and it was just that bit off. He spent days staring at the lamp until he realized that he was dreaming, and then his reality unraveled itself. 

Yuri was always looking for his lamp. 

He opened his eyes, and looked up to the sky. It was not blue- it was grey, and it was starting to rain. He was not in Hasetsu, he was in St. Petersburg, and his eye twitched with the force of a raindrop landing on his eyelashes. 

Today was Sunday, August 5th, 2018. Yuri Plisetsky was seventeen years old, and none the better for it.

“You missed seeing Misha in the Asian Open Trophy.”

“Did I? I didn’t know he was competing,” Yuri muttered, closing his eyes and tilting his head back. 

“He did well. Placed second.”

“Hmm. Good on him,” he really didn’t want to talk.

“Do you even remember him?”

“I remember him, Vitya,” he snapped, “I’m not stupid.”

He turned to face Viktor. He was looking at Yuri, but as soon as Yuri’s eyes brushed his nose, Viktor turned to face the Neva again. His arms were crossed over the bridge railing. 

“I’m just checking- I… you’re not… right now?”

Yuri sighed, softening a little, “of course not. No. I’m f-” but his voice caught on _fine_ , like it knew it was a lie, “I’m… not right now, no.”

“I’m glad. Will you- how long has it been?”

“Last night.”

Viktor dropped his head onto his arms, “Jesus, Yurochka,” and then he said something that sounded like “ _where did you go?_ ” -but Yuri couldn’t tell. 

“I’m sorry,” Yuri said, and he was. He was sorry to everyone. 

“Maybe you should apologize to yourself,” Viktor said, “you haven’t been very kind to yourself lately.”

He pulled a squashed box of cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his coat, saying nothing. He bent over as he flicked on the lighter, trying to shield it from the downpour. The rain was beating down harder, freezing him from the inside out. His fingers were starting to go numb. 

When he righted himself, smoldering cigarette clenched between his pursed lips, Vitya raised his head from the rail. He side-eyed it, running a gloved hand down his face.

“A cigarette, Yura, really? It’s raining. Those are bad for your lungs.”

“I know,” he said, in lieu of any real answer. Because he did.

“I just wish-”

“Listen, if you came out here to _lecture me,_ ” he shoved the pack back into his coat, “then you can leave. I’ve heard it a thousand times before, okay? Besides, it’s not like I can compete anyway.”

“You can,” Vitya said, and if Yuri didn’t know better, he’d think the old man was pleading with him, “Yakov said it. You can compete. Maybe not in the Grand Prix, but in Worlds-”

“I’d have to get better first,” Yuri said, grimacing at how easy it felt to inhale the smoke now. When did that happen?

“Then get better. Please. I miss you,” Viktor said, and he wasn’t making eye contact. 

Quietly, tentatively, he said, “I’m right here.”

Viktor shook his head, and his blue eyes pierced through Yuri’s. 

“You and I both know you haven’t been. Not for a long time.”

Yuri was sure, as Viktor walked away, that not even the rain could hide his tears. 

_“...Is that…”_

_“Please, please, I miss you so much, please. I love you so much I miss you so much I miss Yuuri and Yakov and Mila so much,” Viktor was holding him as he sobbed, “I miss being a family I miss dedushka I miss him so much.”_

_“He was too young to die,” Viktor said, and so Yuri threw up all over Viktor’s back._

_Next thing he knew, he was in a hospital waiting room. He was fine, he didn’t need to be in a hospital waiting room._

_“I’m… fine,” he slurred, but he couldn’t stand up. He didn’t know if he was supposed to be able to. He looked sick, “I’m sorry,” he said, “please don’t arrest me. I can’t go to jail.”_

_A nurse was there, he was in a hospital bed, and there was a needle sticking out of his arm. Viktor was sitting in a chair opposite him, hands threaded through his hair._

_“What did you drink?” the nurse asked. He wasn’t speaking Russian._

_“I don’t… remember,” Yuri said, and he did remember. But he couldn’t say it, he didn’t know why. Couldn’t figure out why, “I’m gonna take a nap.”_

_He woke up, gagging, but nothing would come out. So he fell back asleep. No point being awake._

_The next time he woke up, he was coherent. Enough._

_“What did you drink?” the nurse asked, just like last time, and this time Yuri answered._

_“Jesus,” the nurse said. Viktor’s eyes looked red._

_“I missed my skate, didn’t I?”_

_Viktor nodded._

_“That’s- that’s okay. I don’t need… need to skate. I just… need you. And some water. Can I get some water?”_

On the 17th of February, 2018, at ten in the morning, Korean Standard Time, Yuri was slated to skate in the Men’s Singles Free at the Pyeongchang Olympics. He had been in third place after the short program. On the 16th of February that same year, at five thirty four in the evening, Moscow Standard Time, Nikolai Plisetsky died. 

Yuri never competed in the Men’s Singles Free, dropping out of competition, leaving Yuuri Katsuki to grab gold. Not that Yuuri wouldn’t have gotten first anyways, but Viktor and Yuri weren’t there to see it- Yuri was at the hospital, getting his stomach pumped. Yakov had to be there for the other Russian skaters, and Yuri understood. 

At least they all made it to the funeral. Yuri just wished that they had realized, at that time, that it was his funeral, too. That he was too scared and embarrassed and ashamed to admit that he was hurting. By the time they realized, it was too late.

Now he was sick, and he wasn’t allowed to compete in the Grand Prix Series. Yakov said it was temporary, just until he got well enough to skate, but Yuri knew that if he didn’t compete this season, he’d probably never do it again. It was just a shame that he would be retiring over a decade earlier than Viktor had. 

Yuri sucked the rest of the life out of the cigarette, and flicked the butt into the roiling swollen current of the Neva. He would have time to feel bad about littering later, but he needed to get inside before he froze to death. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hands on his way off the Tuchkov bridge, but all it served to do was smear the water around. 

As he passed the Lukoil gas station, a couple, huddled beneath an umbrella and nervously looking in between their surroundings and a phone, gave him a strange look. He glared back. His entire body was shaking by then. 

“I’m back,” he called, thrusting open the door to the rink. He was going for something more sardonic, but it just fell flat. Probably because nobody really gave a shit where he was anymore. 

The receptionist looked up from her computer, gave him a terse smile, and returned her eyes to her screen. She was probably playing minesweeper, or something. His footsteps echoed as he crossed the lobby. 

Nobody was in the locker room when he opened it. It made sense- his argument with Yakov started when he showed up late to practice, while everyone else was warming up. He’d only been gone for half an hour. It’d make no sense for them to already be wrapping up. 

He was still shaking long after he’d dried himself off and changed into clean, warm clothes, and he wondered if this was how he’d be from then on. Shivering all the time like a goddamn chihuahua. He let his anger out in the way he yanked his laces. 

None of the skaters looked at him for more than a brief glance when he entered, and Yuri appreciated the pointed effort to not stare at him. He wasn’t very pleasant to look at anymore, anyways. 

Yakov was next to him as he was pulling off his skate guards and stepping onto the ice. 

“Yurochka-” he started.

“What?”

“I-” he sighed, shaking his head, “never mind.”

Yuri sneered, pushing onto the ice. He didn’t want to skate, if he was being honest, not with all the people around. Maybe if he was alone. But he never got to be alone, these days. Not when he wanted to be. Not on the ice. It was like everyone could read his mind, and then they deliberately did the exact opposite of what he wanted them to. 

_Can’t you see?_ he cried out, silently, as he rounded the rink, _can’t you see that I just need someone there with me? That I just need someone to hug me, to tell me it’ll all be okay?_

After three laps, he launched himself into drilling his jumps. The rest of the skaters studiously paid him no mind, but Yakov’s eyes were boring fiercely into his skull. 

_“Yura, you’re late.”_

_“I know,” he dumped his bag onto the bench with a huff, “I overslept.”_

_“Is it because you had a hangover?”_

_“I don’t_ get _hangovers.”_

_Yakov fixed him with a blank stare, though his face was starting to redden, “I think we both know why that is.”_

_“Fuck off,” Yuri said, and his voice was rising to a dangerous level. Skaters in their immediate vicinity looked over at them._

_“You’re throwing your career away!” Yakov said, and now he was angry._

_“I KNOW!” he slammed his fist onto the bench, lowering his voice, “I know that.”_

_"Then stop,” Yakov said, and his voice was calmer now, too._

_Yuri curled the corner of his lip contemptuously, not bothering to shoulder his bag as he stuffed his foot back into his shoe, “I wish it was that easy.”_

_He tried not to feel guilty as he walked into the crisp afternoon air of St. Petersburg._

Not for the first time that day, he imagined he was in Hasetsu. He didn’t know when the place became so dear to him (he did), but it sat someplace special in his heart. It was like if he could go there, all his troubles would melt away. Like it was the only place safe from himself. He was scared that if he went to Hasetsu now, he’d never look at it the same way. 

“ _YURA-_ ”

He caught an edge. He was going too fast, and his legs were unstable, and he practically went flying. 

“Are you okay?” Yuuri asked, concern lacing his voice. Mila silenced her laughter. 

Yuri nodded, sitting up, “I’m fine. Knee is probably gonna bruise, but that’s it,” remembering he was supposed to be abrasive, he tacked on a half-hearted, “loser.”

Then Yakov was at the boards, and he was yelling at Yuri.

“How _careless_ can you be? Pay attention! You could’ve been seriously injured, and then what? Then you’d actually never compete again.”

Yuri bit his lip, beating back the pressing tears. He balled it up, the disappointment, the sadness, and shot it out into anger. 

“Yakov, you and I and everybody knows that I’m never competing again,” he shouted, and he shocked himself with the admission. He slammed his balled-up fists against the ice, he couldn’t hold his tears back any longer. 

“Don’t talk like that,” Yakov said, gruff. 

Yuri was hysterical, “I’ll talk however the fuck I want!” he struggled to his feet, on his own, ignoring Katsudon’s outstretched hand, “nothing is good anymore! Even if I competed, I sure as hell wouldn’t win, so what’s even the point? We’re all just gonna have to accept that the Olympics was the last competition I’d ever skate and move on with our lives.”

His throat burned, and his head was starting to hurt from the rivulets of water pouring from his eyes and carving riverbeds into his soft skin. He couldn’t be there anymore- he needed to go. His skates sounded like a tantrum as he slid away.

 _That was embarrassing,_ he thought. The other skaters should have been used to his histrionics by then, but still, they were slow to unpause. He fumbled through putting his skate guards back on, acutely aware of the rest of the rink’s eyes on his back, and practically ran to the changing rooms. 

It was only then, he realized with dismay, that he hadn’t brought a second change of clothes. All of his clothes were sopping wet and freezing cold, and there was no way he’d survive the commute home in his breezy lycra workout ensemble.

“Yura,” Yakov said. He was standing in the doorway.

Yuri sat down on the bench, resting his palms on his eyes and letting the tears pool in the grooves of his skin. 

“Save it,” he said, unable to keep the hitch out of his voice. 

He felt Yakov sit down next to him, place a hand on his back. “I’m not here to lecture you, or yell at you,” he sounded deeply out of his element. 

Yuri didn’t think he’d ever heard Yakov speak like that. So softly. 

“I’m s-sorry,” Yuri cried, flinging himself into Yakov’s embrace. 

“Shh, Yurochka, it’s okay. It’s okay. You’ve had a rough year. It’s why I want you to take a season off.”

“If I do th-that- Yakov, you’re retiring. This is your last season. I don’t- I just wish things could be like they used to be.”

“I know that. I know. But Yurochka, retiring or not, I’ll always be there for you. And I promise you, whenever you decide to come back to skating, give me a call. I’ll coach you. Besides,” Yakov chuckled, “Viktor still needs all the help he can get. I’ll never tell him to his face, but he’s starting to get good at coaching anyone who _isn’t_ Katsuki,” Yuri let out a sniffly wet laugh,”-and I _want_ you to be able to skate this season, but- it’s closing in on us, and you’d have to do a lot of catchup,” Yakov sighed underneath Yuri’s death grip, “and whether or not you skate this season, I’d like you to go to rehab in America.”

Yuri mumbled, “okay.”

Yakov seemed shocked, “okay? I was expecting more fight from you, Yura.”

“I’m tired of trying to get better on my own.”

“You’ve never been alone, Yurochka. You’ve always had us.”

“I know. I just never let myself feel like it.”

Yakov patted him on the back, rubbing in slow circles. Just like Yuri’s dedushka used to do when he would have his apoplectic fits.

“I’ll work something out in the next week,” Yakov stood, unpeeling himself from Yuri, “c’mon. Let’s get you home.”

Yuri shook his head. 

“No?”

“I don’t wanna be alone,” he cried, and he sounded like a sniveling little kid. He didn’t care, he was sick and tired of trying to be more adult than he was. 

“Okay, Yura. I won’t leave you alone.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mind the dead dove: do not eat tag! I focus pretty heavily on consequences in this fic but a lot of actions that Yuri and other characters do I do not explicitly condemn. just a quick little stock warning that these characters are not representative of my opinions or beliefs and so the things that they do/think/say are not necessarily the same as what I do/think/say
> 
> I've already got a hefty chunk of chapters written, and I'm looking forward to posting them! I'll probably get the second chapter up tonight. I'll probably write more in the end notes later on (I have a LOT to say about this fic) but I hope you all enjoy it!


	2. Saturday, October 13, 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for talk of substance abuse/alcohol abuse

The sky was grey in St. Petersburg when Yuri got back from rehab. It wasn’t the _almost going to rain_ type of cloud cover, just the _I make everything too bright and too flat_ type of grey. Better, but still not blue. 

He wouldn’t be able to compete, at least not in the Grand Prix Series- his two month stay, leaving him only two weeks before Skate America, made sure of that. He would be traveling around with Yakov, though, because the idea of staying in that drafty, empty apartment alone made him want to drink or shoot up- which was kind of what the two months of rehab were trying to keep him from doing. 

_“I would just like to start this session out by asking you all: what made you decide to finally get help?” Vaishnavi asked, peering at the group over her thin, wire-rimmed spectacles. Yuri was the youngest one there._

_Mark spoke up first, “it was actually- the second time I went to the hospital. It was in the middle of the workday, and I just kind of… realized how absolutely ridiculous it was that I had lost so much control of my life that I was getting alcohol poisoning in my cubicle,” he let out a little laugh, “I tried doing it myself, at first, but that didn’t work out, so I just, I don’t know, checked myself in.”_

_“Sort of the same thing for me,” a nervy man in his mid-30s, whose name Yuri had already forgotten, said, “overdosed for it, and my family had an intervention. Fought back against it until I realized that I was spiraling. I didn’t like being on the other side of the Narcan.”_

_They went around the circle, and for the most part, it was the same thing. A grand epiphany, a big moment, hospitalization, starting out slow, ending with the extreme. An inverse of Yuri’s experience. He’d always known he had a problem, he just didn’t care enough to do anything about it._

_“Yuri? What about you?” Vaishnavi asked._

_This was what he said:_

_“Oh, uh- um. I don’t know,” he shrugged his shoulders, “it just- I just got tired of fighting everyone on it.”_

_This was what he didn’t say:_

_I got tired of pushing everyone away. I got tired of having to fight for my career and for my health. I missed being myself. I missed my friends, my family. I got tired of having to take a piss every ten minutes. I got tired of wondering if that time would be the one I got HIV. I got tired of worrying everyone around me._

_I got tired, and I wanted to feel awake again. I wanted to feel the same way I did that day in Hasetsu, eyes wide open._

Yuri was knocked out of his staring match with the sky by the vibrating of his phone in his pocket. No caller ID, but the call was coming from Almaty. His fingers buzzed. They hadn’t talked to each other in awhile. 

“Hello,” Yuri said, putting the phone to his ear. 

_“Hi, Yuri. It’s Otabek.”_

“I know.”

Silence, filled by the roaring of cars as they passed down Bolshoy Prospekt. Yuri was staring up at the cyrillic lettering of the rink, trying to will himself to go in. 

_“How’s it going?”_ Otabek asked. 

“Mediocre at best,” Yuri said, and almost laughed at how awkward this was. He and Otabek used to get along a lot better. 

_“Yeah. I, uh, heard that you went to rehab.”_

"Yep,” Yuri said, rocking up onto his toes and then back onto his heels. Still he stared at the rink’s façade. “Just got out, too. Last night. Long flight back from America.”

 _“That’s nice. Doing better?”_

“Yeah, I’d say so. I’ll be seeing you at Skate America, right?”

Otabek’s voice brightened, _“you’re competing?”_

Yuri shook his head, “no. I don’t have any programs prepared. I was gonna try and prepare for Nationals but… I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to skate competitively anymore. It really takes a toll.”

 _“If anyone can do it, it’s you. Eyes of a soldier, remember?”_

Yuri smiled, but he didn’t believe Otabek. What was the use of eyes of a soldier if he didn’t have the heart of one?

“Yeah,” he said, “eyes of a soldier. I, uh… have to go. See you, Beka,” he pressed the _end call_ button without even thinking to wait for Otabek’s response, cursing himself for the nickname. It just slipped out of his mouth. They weren’t familiar enough for that anymore. 

He checked the time on his phone before dropping it back into his pocket. Eight twenty-two in the morning. He’d been standing there, staring at the sky and the sign and back to the sky for twenty-two minutes. 

A hand clamped on his shoulder. 

“Yura!”

He grimaced, “hi, Mila.”

“Doing better?”

“What’s it to you, hag?” which meant _no, not really, but I’m gonna pretend that I am._

Mila grinned, ruffling his hair, which he’d shorn into a regrettably Viktor-esque haircut a couple months prior on a drunken whim. It was down just below his eyes, now. He was trying to will it to grow faster, but several times he’d woken up from a nearly catatonic state only to find his hair shorter again. Crazy how that worked. 

“It’s-” and Mila’s eyes went hazy, “it means a lot to me. I know I don’t usually get sappy with you,” Yuri rolled his eyes, “but for- I don’t know how long, you didn’t seem like yourself. You never called me hag. I know you’re just pretending,” she huffed, “I’m not _stupid,_ but at least you’re bothering to pretend. It’s good to have you back.”

Yuri smiled- it was a terse, uneasy smile, but it was a smile nonetheless. “Halfway back.”

Mila smiled, and hers was full and gleaming. He missed being able to smile like that. 

“Halfway back is better than all the way gone.”

So when she headed into the rink, he swallowed his apprehension and followed her. 

He wasn’t skating today. It was too early for that, like doing a quad on a broken leg. He needed time to rest and recover still- not skating was a breath of fresh air that he didn’t know he’d needed. He’d been stuck under the covers for so long, muggy and stifling, that he hadn’t even realized how wrong it had felt. 

When he’d first realized that that was where the exhaustion was coming from, therapy after therapy session, he’d approached the idea with consternation. It was not an idea that he’d wanted to lay claim to, but he was fine with it now. He held it close to his chest, though with loose fingers, ready to let go when he needed to.

_“You’ve burnt yourself out,” his therapist, Dr. Burns, said._

_“Come again?” he’d never heard that expression._

_Dr. Burns shifted in her seat, crossing a leg over the other. Her pantyhose rasped against each other. Her red lips set themselves into a neat, pursed line, crinkling upwards at the cupid’s bow._

_“Like a match. Think of it like this: you’re a match, and your passion for skating, your skating_ itself, _is the fire. You burnt out too quick too fast, and you’ve spent the past several months trying to collect all of the ashes into a working match again. But you see how that wouldn’t work, don’t you?”_

 _“I… guess. But I don’t think- that… all of my_ problems _come from my skating. It’s my- my personal life.”_

_“Well, of course not all of your problems are going to stem from skating. You don’t just skate, you have a whole host of other things to think about and worry about. It’s normal. But skating, from the way you describe it, seems to be more of a stressor than something positive.”_

_Yuri shook his head, “I love skating. It’s one of the most important things in my life.”_

_“I can see that. But it’s also breaking you down, reducing you to ashes. And if you keep going like this, you won’t be able to love it anymore. It’ll be something you despise for doing what it did to you. You can love something, and it can be important, but you don’t need to spend all of your time with it.”_

_“I don’t understand.”_

_Dr. Burns sighed, “like- your friends. Think of the aspects of your life as friends. You need a break from them sometimes, right? You can’t spend all of your time with them, otherwise they start to annoy you? That’s like with skating. Maybe you need to focus on some other friends for a bit.”_

_“I do spend most of my time with my friends,” Yuri said, obstinate._

_Dr. Burns smiled, and it seemed sad, “I know. You seem afraid of being lonely. Maybe it’s time you face that fear?”_

The rink felt at once overly-familiar and stranger to him. Two months was the longest he’d ever been from St. Petersburg since he’d moved here some years ago, and it was a strange homecoming indeed. He didn’t have a bag with him, the weight of his skates a reminder of his purpose. All he had were the clothes on his back and a healthy dose of unease. 

“Yuri!” Misha called, smashing into the boards that Yuri was approaching. 

“Mikhail,” Yuri said, curt. He didn’t know Misha too well, he was one of the Juniors under assistant coach Medina Orlova and Viktor’s joint tutelage- and about two years younger than Yuri. Which he knew wasn’t an excuse, considering he’d never had any problem with making friends twice his age, but it felt awkward from the other end. Was this how all of his friends thought of him?

“Call me Misha. Did you see me in the Asian Open?” 

“I did, I watched it on the plane to- you did well, kid. You need to work on your Biellman, it looked sloppy in your free skate-”

Misha whined and stomped his foot, “boo, you’re just as bad as Yakov and Viktor. Yakov isn’t even my _coach._ ”

Yuri snorted, “of course I’m like them. Who do you think raised me?”

Misha laughed at that, an open, guffawing laugh, that he only strangled off when Viktor came up behind him and cleared his throat. His expression was too dark for the offense that caused it. Towering over the black-haired boy, Viktor looked ominous. It was hilarious. 

“Mikhail Ivanovich, does this look like doing figures to you?” Viktor said, lowly. 

“No…” 

“If you do not get out and start working those blades in thirty seconds I will kill you.”

“I don’t even understand why I need to do figures,” Misha protested, “we don’t even do them in competition anymore. There’s no point.”

Viktor wagged a finger in Misha’s face, “ah ah ah, don’t you dare besmirch the namesake of our beloved sport. We’ve had this same conversation eighty thousand times, and so help me god if that number turns to eighty thousand and one you will not live to turn it into eighty thousand and two. Get out there and do paragraph double threes until you drop. Or I tell you to stop. Whichever comes first.”

“Ew,” but Misha pushed off the boards anyways. 

Yuri felt, in that moment, undeniably warmer than he had in months. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just to be clear about the content warnings: they'll be at the head of the chapter for each chapter (unless there are no content warnings for that specific chapter) and some of the more general ones are going to be in the tags. I don't really want to spoil parts of it but there won't be any surprise deaths or anything like that. my #1 rule is that everything needs to end happier than it started (usually, lol) so! don't worry guys
> 
> yeah I'm thinking that this is all I'm going to post for today. I've got at least 2 or 3 more chapters written (I'm not really counting) but I'm going to try and hold a steadier upload schedule. I'm going to TRY and finish this (I usually don't finish things, oops!) but if I don't please do not be mad at me. 
> 
> hope you like it! 
> 
> (also, for anybody that's hoping for otayuri: I apologize, but I just do not like that ship. at most they will be friends)


	3. Wednesday, October 17th, 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No CW for this chapter, I believe!

_“I just- I just close my eyes, and I feel the rhythm flow through me. I don’t know how to explain it. Sometimes it just helps to put on music and close your eyes and let the music take you far, far away.”_

Yuri had been _trying_ for the past hour, but nothing was working. He just didn’t feel the thrum of the music- everything felt too measured and technical and he was getting pissed off. 

The only person in the room to hear the sound his phone made when he threw it against the ice was himself. When he went to pick it up, his hand was shaking. He skated over to the side of the rink, placing his phone gently down on the lip of the boards. His finger missed the play button on _Caribbean Blue_ about ten times before it finally landed, and the music sounded worse through the tinny speakers of his phone than through his headphones, but he felt less closed-off. 

He skated out to the middle of the rink, arms outstretched to Enya’s dulcet tones carrying across the ice. 

It helped to hear the scrape and slide of his blades, he thought, even if he still felt frustratingly robotic. He tried to imagine himself light on his feet, gliding across the ice like he weighed nothing. It didn’t work. He wanted to scream. 

So he did, letting the scream carry him into an under-rotated triple axel. The sweeping, forced grace of his movements turned into something far too angry for the tone of the music. He picked up speed as he twirled across the ice, and landed a heavy-footed triple Salchow. His aggravation grew to a frightening crescendo, blinding and deafening him to the world outside of his body and the music. 

Try as he might, he still couldn’t feel the music. Not the way Katsuki described it. 

He wasn’t the skater he used to be. He was trying desperately not to have to come to terms with it. 

He was so mired in his own inability to _feel the goddamned music_ that he didn’t notice the crisp snick of another pair of blades on the ice, the quiet murmuring scrapes that they made as they rounded the rink several times, the clicks they made as they neared his ever-evolving position. 

He was midway through the setup to a flip when he felt a pair of hands, far colder than his, on his wrists. His eyes popped open in shock. 

“You’re having trouble with this,” Katsuki said, detaching momentarily to do an effortless twizzle before grabbing Yuri’s hands again, “do you want me to help?”

“As if,” Yuri snarled, but didn’t pry himself away, which meant _yes._

“Then let’s dance.”

 _Caribbean Blue_ looped, and Katsuki drew Yuri into the center, stopping momentarily to signal the beginning of their ‘program.’ Yuri, floundering still at five foot six, was left staring at Yuuri’s nose. 

Then Yuuri moved, and Yuri was being dragged in all measures across the ice. He was lagging behind, just a picosecond or two, but enough to make him feel like he was being stranded by the music. Then Katsuki relinquished his hold on Yuri, skating away, and something clicked. 

It passed by in a glorious, elated blur, and by the time he realized that the song had probably looped about three times since they’d begun, he was on the floor, too exhausted to continue. Katsuki, stamina of the gods even in his last season as a competitive figure skater, graciously jumped over Yuri’s prone form, though he was a little bit worried about being gutted by the other man’s threatening blades. 

The music paused, and seconds later, Katsuki’s face was hovering over his, grin on his face. Yuri laughed. He couldn’t stop smiling. 

“Hey, Pirozhki,” Katsudon said, extending a helping hand, “if you retire before me, I’m gonna be real pissed off. There’s only room for one Yuri on the competitive circuit, and I’ll kick your ass if it ends up being me.”

Yuri stared at Yuuri in silence. Then he grabbed Yuuri by the shoulders and pulled him in. 

“I missed you so much, Katsudon,” Yuri said, thankfully bereft of tears, “you’re my best fucking friend, and don’t you dare ever forget that.”

“Otabek is rolling in his grave,” Yuuri joked. 

Yuri sighed into the hug, “I really need to fix things with him, don’t I?”

He felt Yuuri nod. 

“He called me. A couple of days ago. The morning I got back.”

Yuuri pried Yuri off of him, though Yuri felt borderline sick at the lack of contact. What was it the therapist called it? _Touch-starved?_

“What did he say?” Katsuki did a contemplative spiral.

"Just said that he heard I got out of rehab, asked how I was doing, told him I would see him at Skate America. He asked if I was competing. I said no. Then I hung up.”

“You’re flying out tomorrow, so you can talk to him at Skate America,” then Yuuri rounded on him with a ruler-straight pointer finger, “ _after_ the free skate.”

“Okay, okay,” Yuri conceded, although he wasn’t planning on fighting back anyways. 

He was overheating quickly, blood still coursing through his veins. He lay back down on the ice, and, to his surprise, Yuuri joined him. 

“You aren’t supposed to be skating yet,” Yuuri said, looking up at the beams criss-crossing the ceiling.

“I know. I just needed this.”

“I get it.”

Yuri screwed his eyes shut, pressing his gloved hands flat to the ice. He was in St. Petersburg, but he could pretend he wasn’t. Ice felt the same no matter which country you were in. 

“Yuuri?”

“Hm?”

“Choreograph my free program for me,” Yuri said. 

Yuuri’s head turned sideways, looking at Yuri’s ear, “does that mean…?”

“Yeah. I’ve been working things out with the FFKK these past few days. I’m skating at nationals. It’ll be a tight fit, only two and a half months, but I don’t even care if I make it to Europeans or Worlds.”

“That’s wonderful, Yuri. Of course I’ll choreograph a program for you. I just want to… are you sure you’re ready for this?”

“I wouldn’t be doing it if I weren’t,” Yuri snapped, then softened, “I want to compete. Just to prove to myself and the rest of the world that I’ve still got a future in figure skating. The further away I get from competing, the harder it feels to get back. Y’know?”

Yuuri nodded, because he was probably one of the few that did know. 

“Hey, wanna give the song one more go?” Yuuri asked. 

“Uh-” 

“C’mon, I wanna see you try it on your own again.”

Yuri huffed, and stood, still shaky and exhausted on his feet. But he still had a lingering voice, that of a fourteen-, fifteen-year-old Yuri, nagging about how Yuuri Katsuki was the best man on the planet, even if he sometimes didn’t act like it. So as the music built, he robotically completed some spirals and spins and jumps and then-

The music stopped short, less than a minute in. 

“You’re not feeling the music,” Yuuri said, _tsk_ ing. 

“What the hell is that even supposed to mean? That’s the most abstract shit ever,” Yuri said, breaking out of the pose he’d been holding, “it’s not even real advice.”

“Fine,” Yuuri skated over to him, Yuri’s phone in hand, “listen to this,” he pressed play on the music. 

When he paused it again, Yuri said, “...okay? It’s the same song.”

“I know it is. But what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to skate along to the melody. You’re so focused on the build of emotion and trying to feel loose and free that you’re totally counteracting your efforts. What you need, at first, is a little bit of structure. Then you can let loose. Listen to this again, and try and focus on the background of the music. The rhythm.”

Yuri cocked his head, as if that would help. He still didn’t understand what Yuuri was trying to get him to do. 

“Bum-dum-dum, bum-dum-dum,” Yuuri sang along, then paused the song, “you hear that?”

“It’s… a waltz?”

“Yes, well, it’s in the three-four time signature. So, essentially, yes, a waltz. I know you know how to do a waltz. So waltz to the music, and _then_ try and add some _oomph_ to it. Wiggle your arms or whatever, add some crescendo, some jumps at the right parts, some technical elements. Don’t do any quads, you’ll just injure yourself.”

Katsuki skated to the boards, hopping up so he was sitting down, feet dangling above the ice. 

“Okay, get out to the middle of the ice, okay, three, two, one-”

Yuri started to waltz. Waltzing was hard on the ice, and without a partner, so he improvised by skating around the rink, doing turns in three steps. _Bum-dum-dum, bum-dum-dum,_ and then he broke from his pattern, started doing some simple three-turns and counter turns, spinning around and side-to-side in dizzying ease of motion. That light feeling that he’d been trying to force earlier came naturally to him. He stretched out his arms, lowered them into the ice to hydroblade, then up into a scratch spin. An improvised step sequence, light and airy and staccato, before becoming long and languid as the music stretched out before him. A respite- a long, layback Ina Bauer, then a triple toe-euler-double toe combo, then a step sequence with his arms stretched and splayed. He felt it, now. He understood. 

He finished with his right arm crossed over his chest, half-cupping his face with a delicate palm, his left arm encircling his waist, his right leg at a forty five degree angle, toe pointed, and his eyes cast demurely up towards the sky. It was too sweet an ending for such a melancholy, hopeful song, and he’d have to fix that. The song did not end in happiness- it was about being mired in sadness while knowing that something better lay ahead. 

“That was excellent!” Yuuri clapped, “the ending pose didn’t feel _right,_ somehow, but you really had the energy this time. Do it again, but start out with that same energy.”

Yuri was exhausted, but it was a _good_ type of exhausted- the type that spelled out more to come, with buzzing muscles yearning for action. He put himself into a starting pose, careful to fix his face into something more aching. 

He swung himself out, letting his legs lead and his torso follow. His arms moved wherever his elements guided them. It was like pressing on forward, regardless of apprehension, letting the utterly human desire for dynamics guide him, instead of being held back by the utterly human desire for stagnance. 

The end pose was still dissatisfying, though better. He looked a man in mourning, with his body- closed in, hunched over- but his eyes looked toward the ceiling again, hoping to reach it. Hoping even to reach past it. 

Yuuri didn’t say anything. Yuri broke his pose, looked over to Katsuki, and was incensed to see the man staring at his phone. 

“Katsudon!” he shouted, “did you even fucking watch that? You useless-”

Yuuri laughed, “of course I watched it, Yurio,” he slid off the boards and onto the ice, “I was filming it. That was a really good program- of course, to debut it, you’d have to tweak some things, add in some more competitive elements, fine-tune some of the step sequences and-”

Yuri squawked, going to grab for Yuuri’s phone, “did you just trick me into choreographing my own damn program?” 

Yuuri beamed, holding the phone above Yuri’s head. “I sure did. Of course, it’s just the bare-bones of a program. Since I’m not going to Skate America, I’ll add some meat to the skeleton while you’re gone, and by the time you get back, you should have a mostly-fledged free program to debut at nationals.”

Yuri sneered, “how incredibly rude of you, Katsudon, after you promised,” but they both knew he was joking. 

“Well, I did help you get there. And besides, a program isn’t worth jack if you can’t emotionally connect to it. Sure I can make you a good program, but as Viktor always says, _you_ have to make it into a winning program. By ensuring you’re emotionally- or at least artistically- invested in the program from the start, you’ve already got a leg up. It’s less work overall, for the both of us,” Yuuri pocketed his own phone, handing Yuri’s back to him. 

Yuri shook his head, “Katsudon, I would never tell you this in a million years- I don’t want you to get a big head- but you’re kind of a genius on the ice. If you tell anyone I said that, not only will they not believe you and therefore view you as a dishonest man for the rest of time, but I will also kill you for treason.”

“So what are you planning for your short program?” 

Yuri dragged his hand down his face, doing a spin and groaning, “I have no idea. I was thinking about _The Girl with the Flaxen Hair_?”

“Debussy? I mean, it’s a beautiful song, but a little lackluster, don’t you think? It seems like something you’d have a hard time skating to, and it’s really quite different from your free skate song. It’s got some melancholy undertones, but it kind of speaks of love. I’m not saying to not do it, but think about what you want to project with your programs.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right. When I suggested it to Lilia, she told me it was, and I quote, _‘utterly boring.’_ ” 

Yuuri laughed, “I think she might be right. Then again, she’s right about a lot. Walk you home? We can talk about music choices on the way.”

“Sure. _Le carnaval des animaux?_ Saint-Saëns,” he slipped on his skate guards. 

“Which one was that again?”

Yuri hummed the tune as they walked to the locker room, and Yuuri nodded, “ah! I’d have to listen to it again, but it’s a worthy consideration. More thrilling than _Flaxen._ ”

“Are you implying that Debussy isn’t exciting?”

“Yes. Beautiful, but could one _really_ say his music is exciting?”

Yuri did a half-turn jump, dancing ahead as he crossed his legs over each other and pinwheeled his arms, “Liszt, then? A Paganini étude? If you’re going for thrilling…” 

“What if we just commissioned new music?” 

“ _We?_ You’re speaking like a coach, Yuuri,” Yuri teased, fumbling with the knot on his left skate. 

Yuuri blushed, “ah, well- well-”

“I’m just kidding,” Yuri said, triumphantly freeing the laces from each other’s embrace, “but you should consider coaching. I know you said that it wasn’t for you, but you’d be a really good coach.”

Yuuri laughed, skates already fully off- how did he do that so fast? “Maybe it’s a Viktor situation, where you’re the only person I’m good at coaching.”

“I sure hope that the coaching part is where the similarity ends, Katsudon, because I don’t want to make out with you at the- which was it? The Cup of China?”

Katsuki blushed, “shut _up,_ ” then, putting a finger to his lips contemplatively, a habit he picked up from Viktor, “it’s too late to commission music, though, isn’t it? You’ve got two and a half months to train for nationals, and if we commissioned music that’d probably put you at only two months for training the short program,” he grimaced, “which, given your two-month hiatus, would be insufficient. Two and a half is _barely_ sufficient as it is.”

Yuri rolled his eyes, “thanks for the reminder. Shall we?”

Yuuri grinned. The outside air hit them both like a truck, and they pulled their scarves tighter around their faces.

_“It’s time to go. Shall we?” Yuuri asked._

_“What? Shall we what?”_

_Yuuri laughed, “oh, it’s like an expression. In America. ‘Shall we go?’ but it basically just means ‘move your ass we’re leaving now,’” his expression turned wistful, “Phichit and I were so confused the first time we heard it said. We sat there for five minutes like fools while the rest of our friends were getting ready to go.”_

_“Loser,” Yuri said._

_“Asshole.”_

Yuri’s smile was swept away by the sight of his apartment. He hadn’t even realized that he was walking to it. He’d been staying at Yakov’s for the past week. He grimaced at the state of the place. Clothes strewn across the floor, empty bottles shoved into a pile in the corner, it was practically a pigsty. 

“I didn’t mean to come here,” he said, ignoring the crack in his voice. 

Yuuri ushered him out, shutting the door behind them, “that’s okay. We can go.”

Yuri nodded, and his voice was flat again when he spoke, the way it usually was, carefully devoid of emotion, “I want to move out of it. But I know Yakov doesn’t want me to live with him and Lilia for the rest of my career, but I don’t-” _want to live alone,_ the words left unsaid. 

“That’s okay,” a guiding hand between his shoulder blades, and Yuri felt sort of angry for it. 

“It’s not,” he said, and he meant it to come out bitter but it came out flat. He wanted desperately for his voice to pitch up in distress again, “but I have to grow up, don’t I?”

“Growing up is overrated,” Yuuri said, “and growing up doesn’t mean being alone. I realized that a lot later than I should have. Growing up means realizing that you don’t need to be alone. It’s a very important step, that I’m sure they taught you in therapy.”

Yuri laughed, “they didn’t, actually. They mostly taught me how to cope with addiction.”

“Do you want to stay at my place tonight? Or do you want me to take you back to Yakov’s?” 

“Your place is closer. Let me call Yakov.”

They stepped out of the lobby of the apartment building and into the biting cold of autumn in St. Petersburg. The sky was an inky black, cloudless for once, and he was so thankful that he could see the stars. He felt like he could travel upwards forever.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just some Yuri-yuuri bonding time! I love my boys so much, I love exploring the dynamic between them! this is a little bit of a different dynamic than in canon, because obviously Yuri has changed a lot and so has Yuuri and they've also known each other for a little over 3 years. also! Yuri and Yuuri are best friends because I say so 
> 
> I love explaining my authorial decisions for no good reason so I just wanted to say that I'm leaving Yuri looking young for a reason. he's short for the the same reason. he's 17, which is actually really young, and I want to just kind of point out that when other people see him doing self-destructive things they're seeing someone who looks like a 14-15 year old doing them. it's just, y'know, a choice. makes it feel worse to see kids doing those types of things. I SWEAR this note was better worded in my head when I was biking home from school I swear. 
> 
> certain updates are going to take longer than others because some chapters have foreshadowing to scenes/events that I have chosen to remove, and I'm also struggling to find a couple more chapters within myself, yknow? so if you're following this series sorry :-( I have a terrible track record of starting and not finishing things but I'm really determined to finish this (also, I know where the ending will be, which I usually struggle with when it comes to fics. a little insight into the creative process is that I literally will get a vibe and write about it which means I rarely have a strong central plot. I need to learn how to write something other than man vs. self.)
> 
> comments and kudos make my day, so feel free to leave one if you so please. of course, you don't need to, and I'm not forcing you, but it'd be lovely.


	4. Saturday, October 20th, 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW alcohol abuse ment

It was cloudy in Everett, Washington, when the men’s free skate concluded at Skate America. Yuri, being inside, didn’t see this. He wasn’t in a good mood. 

Yakov was seated next to him, watching Mila run through her program off-ice. 

“Straighten that free leg, Mila. So, you and Katsuki are developing your free and short program?” 

Yuri nodded, crossing his arms and sinking down in his chair, “the free is almost completely done.”

“That’s fast- _Mila, so help me_ \- oh, there you go. Good, Mila,” Yakov said. 

“Yeah. We’ve picked out the music for the short, and Yuri’s getting Viktor to choreograph that one.”

A shadow loomed over Yuri, blocking his glazed, unfocused view of Mila’s free program. 

It was Kenjirou Minami, one of the few people that still had a decent opinion of him. 

Minami had grown into his looks, recently- that he could say at least. He was now sitting pretty at five-foot-five, indulging in a growth spurt in between this season and the last. His hair was now a faded pink, his black roots at least an inch long. He was different from the last time Yuri had seen him. 

“Did you see me skate, Yurio?” 

Yuri pulled his mouth into a plasticine smile, “I did. You did really well. Congratulations on pulling second.”

“I’m so happy! I’m gonna beat Yuuri at NHK, just you watch,” Kenjirou stabbed the air with his pointed finger, “come with me! Let’s go watch the programs. Watching people mumble through their programs with skate guards on is way less fun than watching ice dance. C’mon!” 

Yuri let himself be dragged. 

“Anyways,” Minami said, as a pair of tall Canadians took the ice, “what are you doing for the rest of the day?”

“I’m probably gonna talk to Otabek sometime later, but other than that, nothing much. Why?”

“I’m just gonna be bored. Odagaki-sensei is going to be at a dinner with all the other coaches, so I’m not gonna have anything to do. After you’re done hanging out with Otabek, if you wanna hang out, I’ll be free! You can call me anytime.”

“Thanks, Kenjirou-kun,” Yuri said, in his accented Japanese.

A low sound of pain swept through some of the crowd as the Canadian woman suffered a nasty fall. 

“Hey, condiment boy,” he said, elbowing Kenjirou, “they’re doing terrible, aren’t they?”

Minami snickered, “I feel so bad. They’re probably gonna get last, and it’s not even the girl’s fault. The guy just keeps dropping her.”

“Yeah. It must really suck to watch them totally do better than you-”

“Yuri Plisetsky, you _bastard_ -” 

Something settled in his chest as he and Minami traded insults and pulled their punches. 

_“I’ll beat the hell out of you Kenjirou, don’t think otherwise!” he shouted, trying to hide how concerned he was for the other boy. Viktor and Yuuri told him, time and time again, that his ‘encouragement’ was actually just scary and could potentially be considered psychological warfare, but it worked, didn’t it? He had yet to bully anyone off the ice._

_Kenjirou cried louder, “I hate you!”_

_“Good, then win!”_

_Surprising everyone but Yuri, Kenjirou Minami skated the best free skate of his life and hamfisted a silver by the breadth of his skates. Sitting a measly point-three-two points above Yuri in the combined total score, and a couple of inches above Yuri on the podium, he beamed triumphantly. Yuri even more so._

_When, at the press conference, he was asked how he felt about taking bronze after an as of yet silver-and-gold streaked season, Yuri answered: “I got on the podium, and that’s what matters.”_

_And when, later, Kenjirou rounded on Yuri, silver medal clutched in his trembling hands, expecting a fight, Yuri didn’t give it to him. What he gave to him, instead, was a smile._

_“Why aren’t you mad? You said you’d beat me.”_

_“I say that to everyone who disappoints me, condiment boy,” Yuri said, with no lack of haught._

_Minami went red in the face, “how did I disappoint you? That makes no sense! That nickname makes no sense!”_

_Addressing the last complaint first, Yuri pointed to the red streak, “ketchup,” then the ostensibly blond hair, “mustard. And you disappointed me because you placed so well at Japanese nationals and Four Continents and then the moment you’re up against me you do the worst short program I’ve ever seen from you! How is that not supposed to disappoint me? Congratulations on your silver, by the way. You totally beat out Viktor.”_

_Kenjirou’s face returned from tomato to tan, “oh. Oh! Thank you! You too. You need to get better at free skates, you always fuck them up.”_

_He left a fuming Yuri with a pat on the shoulder. (The next time he saw Kenjirou, his hair was green, and Yuri called him relish.)_

_That night, sequestered in his hotel room, he cried over the bronze._

**\+ 7 (727) 121-5215**

_13:15 PST_

can we meet up to talk  
I feel like we still have a lot of  
unresolved issues

Sure. 

I’m free after the press meetings

ok

your room or mine

Not public?

it would be grat for defusing but i  
dont trust either of us not to get  
as mad as last time and the last  
thing i want is for yakov to be on   
my ass about some bullshit   
scandal

*grea

*t

*great

My room works fine.

ok

when does pres end

*press

I have no idea.

3 pm? Maybe?

I’m pretty sure, that Raushan can  
handle everything after the  
press. Let me ask her.

She said that I am free to go after  
press is over.

ok sounds good. im free  
whenever duh because i m not  
doing anything else  
lol

condiment boy my ears are wet   
and it

s uncofmrtable dont laugh

oh oops 

sorry

Its fine.

k see u after press  
j test me or smthing

*text

when its don e

Alright, sounds good.

_15:06 PST_

It’s done. Room number is 506.

k

Yuri pocketed his phone, leaning up against the placard hanging next to the doorway. He ran his fingers idly over the braille and wondered how many germs were on the dull grey metal. He was searching for a distraction, but those always seemed in low supply when he needed one. There was a warping where the beige wallpaper met the mottled blue-and-tan hotel carpet. Down the hall, a pair of giggling teenage girls exited one room and entered another, across the hall and a couple doors down. They were greeted by an equally frenzied pair of girls. One of them glanced his way and waved to him, before turning to her friends and laughing. 

“My friend thinks you’re cute!” one particularly brazen girl shouted. 

He nodded, “tell her I’m gay,” he said, voice only slightly raised. 

The brunette who yelled at him cackled wildly, pulling her friend into the room by the upper arm. Yuri turned back to the warped wallpaper with the sound of their slammed door. 

Yuri checked his phone. Six minutes since Otabek texted him. Seven. 

“Hurry up,” he moaned, under his breath. He tried to acquire super-hearing so that his earshot would reach all the way to the elevators, the hydraulic sounds they made every time they opened and closed. 

Ten minutes. Eleven. Otabek finally arrived, sullen as ever, thirteen minutes after he’d texted Yuri. 

“What took you so long?” Yuri asked, unable to keep the annoyance out of his voice.

“Off to a good start, very friendly,” Otabek said, unlocking the door with his keycard. Yuri followed him inside, rolling his eyes.

Otabek threw his bag onto the mussed-up bed, “it’s a five-minute drive from the arena, and I had to do the usual parting rituals. Being accosted by every skater and their mother.”

Yuri sat down on the edge of the bed that he presumed was not Otabek’s.

“Would you like some tea? Coffee?” Otabek asked, holding up two packets of tea, “take off your shoes.”

Yuri kicked his shoes off. “Stop putzing, Otabek. Avoidance tactics only work when the person you’re trying to avoid is stupid.”

“You’re pretty stupid,” Otabek said, slamming down a paper cup with such force that Yuri was afraid it would shatter, “at least allow me a few _damn_ seconds to collect myself. You’ve had all afternoon for that. That’s one of your problems, you’re always so- so tactless.”

“Fine. Make your fucking tea. Uh- I’ll take the English Breakfast, put some creamer in it.”

“I _will_ make my fucking tea,” Otabek bit. 

Yuri scooted further back on the bed, slumping against the headboard. He crossed his arms and looked petulantly ahead. Then he got bored of staring at the edge of the blank television and started counting the amount of stains on the wall that were probably cum and/or blood. It never worked as well in fancy hotels as it did in motels, but there was one half-hidden behind the armchair and the desk that looked about the right height and size. 

“Careful, it’s hot. And also hasn’t steeped fully yet,” Otabek said, handing Yuri a paper cup filled with a pink, slowly reddening liquid. He then pressed three creamer cups into his left hand.

“So…” Otabek pursed his lips, looking down, “how has your day be-”

“Okay, now this is an avoidance tactic,” Yuri said, placing the mug down on the nightstand and valiantly ignoring the way it splashed up and singed his hand, “you know exactly what I want to talk about.”

“The argument.”

“Exactly. The argument. I just- I never thought we’d-” Yuri tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling. He couldn’t find the right words, but it wasn’t like they’d appear from the ceiling, so he dropped his head back down, looking at Otabek at the foot of the bed. Otabek was pointedly looking out of the window.

_“You’re useless! What, you think I’d be that- that- that- selfish?”_

_“Well I didn’t used to fucking think it, but then you went and proved me wrong, didn’t you? You’re making everything about you, Altin, and it’s not all about you. And I don’t have a problem.”_

_“How many times have you gotten drunk in the last month?” Otabek was furious, “tell me. TELL ME!”_

_Yuri punched Otabek in the eye._

_“FUCK YOU!”_

The conversation went fine. It went fine, so why was he so upset? Maybe trying to repair his relationship with Otabek was more trouble than it was worth- it wasn’t like he knew. 

The other person picked up after the fourth ring. 

“Hey, Minami?”

Kenjirou’s voice was crackly through the speaker, _“oh, hey. Everything good?”_

“Yeah,” he sniffed, cast his eyes up to the sky. It was gearing up to rain soon, because of course, even halfway across the world, he couldn’t escape the grey clouds that always hung over his head. 

_“You wanna hang out?”_

He nodded, before remembering Minami couldn’t see him, “yeah. There’s a Denny’s down the street from the hotel,” a car drove by, displacing the air. He pushed his glasses up. The atmosphere was charged with the oncoming thunderstorm.

_“A Denny’s? Really?”_

“Shut up, Minami, you stupid purist. There’s also some place called-” he squinted his eyes, “Hunan Palace? Chinese food, looks like. Do you want to eat there?”

_“Anything is better than Denny’s.”_

“God, what is your hangup with Denny’s?”

_“Let me set the scene for you,”_ some rustling on the other end of the line, _“Skate America, 2018. Sybille Lorraine and Matthieu Malouf, two ice dancers from France, call me up and go ‘hey Minami, you want to go get’- oh, hey, Odagaki-sensei- I’m just going to Hunan Palace- no- no- with Yuri- yes- sorry about that,_ ” a door slammed, _“Odagaki wanted to know where I was going, sorry. She just came back to change for the second coach dinner. Anyways, what was I saying?”_

“Matthieu and Sybille?” 

_“Oh! So they go ‘Minami, wanna get Denny’s?’ and I go ‘it’s the day before the free skate, I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ and they say ‘euh, it’ll be fine, don’t worry, your coach doesn’t have to know,’ and I go ‘okay.’ Skip to the next morning, I’ve got a killer stomach ache, throwing up all over the place, barely scrape up a bronze, barely get to the Final. Skating with food poisoning sucks. Never again. Never. Again._ ”

Yuri laughed at Minami’s melodramatics, but he also understood. Getting food poisoning the day of your free skate was bound to put you off for awhile. 

_"Ah, Yura, I see you!”_

Yuri turned around, squinting past the cold to see Kenjirou jumping up and down and waving. Minami hung up, and he tucked the phone into the back pocket of his jeans. He waited on the street corner until finally caught up. 

“J-j-jesus, it’s cold out here,” Minami cursed in Japanese, then pushed Yuri’s scarf and the lapels of Yuri’s coat aside to get a better look at his shirt. 

“Sp-supurosti…” he squinted, staring harder at the shirt, “meniya… _what does that_ \- oh moyihhh vaibusu? Does that say _ask me about my vibes_?” 

Yuri nodded proudly, “Mila made it for me. Your Russian accent is still shit, by the way.”

Minami clocked him on the back of the head, “no duh, asshole,” he pounded the crosswalk button about forty times. 

Yuri tugged a stray curl at the nape of Minami’s neck, “your hair is getting long.”

Kenjirou swatted his hand away, “yours is getting short.”

“You should leave it natural, I want to see what you look like with unfried curly hair,” Yuri said. 

“I look Jewish. People always thought I was a foreigner when I was younger, and I would always ask are you stupid and blind? I’m pretty sure I’ve got a very Japanese face,” Minami said, gesturing to his face. 

“Have you ever noticed-” the crosswalk beeped, and they stepped off the curb, “that a lot of Japanese people sound really Californian when they speak English?”

“Weird observation. No.”

“They do. Yuuri doesn’t because he sounds like he walked directly out of a cornfield, but you do and so does Mari and Yuuko. I think it’s the Japanese accent. Kinda weird.”

“I don’t know. You should show me sometime. A side-by-side comparison or something. Oh, hey, look! I’m growing a beard!” Minami pointed to his jawline. Yuri pressed the second crosswalk button. 

“A…” he leaned in, squinting his eyes. He could kind of see it- a wispy, light brown shade, forming mutton chops, “I don’t see it.”

“Of course you do, look, it’s there,” Minami pointed again. Yuri reached up and tugged at a ‘beard’ hair, “OW! What the hell!?”

“Congratulations. Finally, jeez. Took you long enough.”

“Hey, at least I have a full head of hair.”

“Not for long, if you keep frying the hell out of it- wait, are you implying that I’m going bald? I’m seventeen, Minami.”

_Before the Bronze Medal Fiasco, as Yuri so lovingly called it in his head, there was his first-first meeting with Minami. It was not pleasant, and neither party left with a good impression of the other. After their two disastrous first meetings, it was a wonder they managed to hold on and become friends._

_“Stop poking me, Baba,” Yuri bit, the only thing keeping him from biting her finger off being the fact that it happened to be illegal in most countries to do so._

_“I’m bored…” she whined, draping herself over him. He hated that even with his ‘growth spurt,’ he was still two or three inches shorter than her._

_He shoved her off, “then go bother Yakov or Viktor or Yuuri or one of your stupid Italians.”_

_She pouted, “but it’s so fun to bother you.”_

_“Die.”_

_He turned around, ready to walk away from Mila, when he slammed headfirst into something. A person, it turned out, as the other vehicle in the collision started apologizing profusely._

_“I’m so, so sorry! Are you okay? I didn’t-”_

_Yuri scowled, “jesus, would it kill you to look where you’re going?”_

_The other person’s face grew grim, “would it kill you to be polite?”_

_“Everyone around me is so fucking annoying,” Yuri groused, turning heel to run away, when the other boy’s voice stopped him._

_“Maybe it’s just you,” the boy said._

_Yuri ducked his head and pretended that didn’t sting._

“I’m going to step outside for a moment,” Yuri said. 

“Okay, I’ll come get you when our food gets here,” Minami said, flipping idly through the beer catalogue. Neither of them were old enough to drink from it, and Yuri didn’t want to anyways.

The air was even more biting when he stepped out of the restaurant than it had been while waiting for Minami; the clouds looked swollen to burst, and he just desperately hoped that he could take his quick smoke and then duck back inside before they released their torrent on his unsuspecting head. He stepped under the awning, just in case.

He took a grateful suck of the fag, restless energy abating slightly at the feeling of the smoke entering his lungs. It was the first smoke he’d had since coming back from rehab, and he didn’t plan on starting up the habit again- he just kept a couple of loose cigarettes in his coat pocket just in case he happened to need one. An occasional vice. 

The bell at the top of the door jingled as someone stepped out of the restaurant.

“Appetizer is here,” Minami said, and Yuri pried his head from the concrete fencing to turn his head. 

Minami’s face was stained teal from the filtered light through the awning; his eyes were narrowed and appraising. Yuri offered him a wide grin. 

“Smoking is bad for you,” Minami said, leaning up against the wall, hands tucked demurely into the pocket of his windbreaker. 

Yuri snorted, “you know how many times I’ve heard that? I don’t smoke regularly anymore, anyways,” he was about to put the cigarette between his lips when it was snatched from between his fingers. 

“Hey!” he protested, expecting to see Minami crush it below his heel. To his surprise, Minami tucked it into the corner of his mouth, like it was a cigar. 

Kenjirou raised an amused eyebrow at his bemusement. 

“I never said I don’t do bad things sometimes.”

Yuri’s mouth gaped. 

“Shut your mouth,” Minami said, muffled still around the cigarette, “you’ll catch flies.”

Yuri recovered with a chuckle. The rain started its drumroll against the crescent awning. The sky dimmed. 

“You know, condiment boy, dare I say it- if you didn’t have pink hair, that would’ve been kind of hot.”

“Oh, I know,” Kenjirou said, winking, “I’ve been studying,” then, as if the entire statement had just caught up to him, “also, stop slandering my hair!”

Minami took the cigarette out, blowing smoke just to the left of Yuri’s ear- it was so, so cold, but he didn’t feel it anymore. He wasn’t sure if he was as red as Minami was, but he would wager that he was. Thunder cracked, distantly, and Yuri hadn’t even noticed that they’d gotten that close, and-

The bell above the door rang, a busy chattering family squeezing out. Yuri jerked in surprise, but didn’t jump away from Minami. When the mother sent them an indecipherable look, he shuffled away a couple of inches. 

“The- uh, the appetizer is probably getting- it’s probably- it’s-” Minami tried.

“Sure!” Yuri squeaked.

They headed back inside, forgetting whatever the hell that _moment_ was over their sautéed snow peas and sesame beef. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the real 2018 Skate America, it went Ladies Short Program and then Rhythm Dance, but for the sake of the story they are switched. Sorry! I know nobody cares, but for the sake of daylight and having Minami and Yuri hang out I also pushed all of the skates earlier in the day. 
> 
> Fun fact: I did excessive research for this chapter. Hunan Palace is a real place, and the description of the place is real, and Skate America was set in Everett, Washington, and there is a Denny's across the street of the hotel. I don't know what hotel the skaters stayed at in real life and I'm not creepy or dedicated to find out, so I chose the fanciest hotel near the Angel of the Winds Arena (the arena where 2018 Skate America was held) and plopped them in there and also spent a long time trying to find pictures of the hotel hallway carpets in the hotel. Google Maps is a blessing.
> 
> For some explanations: I would love to say that my choice to not include Yuri and Otabek's reconciliation was entirely thematic, but the reality is that I don't actually have a clear idea of what they fought about in the first place and I also wrote the reconciliation three or four times and each time it got away from me and was dissatisfying. I have a doc full of deleted scenes and- hoo boy. 
> 
> I'm probably the least satisfied with this chapter out of all of them. I tried to make it fit with Yuri's particular mental state during Skate America (scattered, fluctuating between okay and absolutely not okay) but I'm not sure how well I did and it mostly just seems like I'm not a good writer and have terrible flow. Oops!
> 
> As for the moment between Yuri and Minami: that one.... I wasn't sure if I wanted to write it? I doubt I'm going to pursue anything further between the two but sometimes friends do awkward shit together like accidentally almost kiss. Originally I was going to include some side romance with Minami but I honestly don't think Yuri is healed enough for any type of romance- you need a lot of stability when recovering from addiction. A sudden new relationship will not help. So I think that the moment is just going to be a standalone weird thing, and maybe I will delete it as the winds of change come and go. But I'm publishing this chapter now because after spending so long on it I feel like it's complete enough to post and if I don't post it now I will never post it. I can always go back and edit, you know?
> 
> Also Yuri still smokes because, I don't know, whatever, you know? He probably won't do it again, and just as the Minami Moment it'll be left a one-off fluke, but I figured it was appropriate to his character to do something like this. 
> 
> Thank you for reading, if you liked it (or hated it with a fiery passion) comments and kudos are appreciated! Constructive feedback is welcomed! I'm always trying to improve as a writer.


	5. Monday, October 22nd, 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW none

The airplane cast a shadow on the clouds below, and Yuri didn’t think he could stomach dipping below them and having to look up to a cloudy grey sky. His stomach roiled at the idea of fighting himself every step of the way again. He shut the window blind- there were still some eleven hours and a layover left before they landed in Pulkovo. 

“Would you like a drink?” the flight attendant asked, pushing her rattling cart up to their row. Yuri mentally urged Yakov and Mila awake. 

“Ginger ale, please,” Yuri said. Maybe it would help settle his gut. 

“Here ya go, sweetie,” the woman had a strong midwestern accent, the same one Yuuri wore when he spoke English, “and you, sir? Anything for you or the young lady?”

Yakov  _ grumphed  _ and waved his hand, Mila blinked twice. 

“A tomato juice and a seltzer for them, please,” he smiled, sure that Yakov and Mila would take at least another seven minutes to be coherent. He felt very badly for the guy he kept leaning over to speak to the flight attendant. 

As Yuri laid into his Seagram’s Ginger Ale and Snyder's  pretzels, the man turned to him. 

“I’m Sam,” he said. He looked bored out of his mind.

“Yuri,” he hoped that the fleck of pretzel that escaped his mouth didn’t land on Sam. 

“Where you headed to?”

Yuri hummed around the glue-like chewed up pretzels. He made the poor executive decision to swallow them immediately, and they lumped up in his throat and slid down as easily as passing a kidney stone. 

“Russia,” Yuri said, washing down his pretzel clump with the last of his carbonated beverage. 

“That’s what the accent is, then,” Sam said, “I’m also going.”

“Oh, really?” Yuri didn’t really want to be talking right now, but it was better than spending the rest of the flight stewing in his thoughts, “why?”

“My wife had a family emergency- it’s resolved, now, but she figured I should meet the folks. She’s really bummed because she had to miss that one figure skating thing, she got tickets and everything since it was in our hometown.” 

Yuri nodded, twanging the tab of his can, “I’m a figure skater, actually. My teammate over there competed, that’s why I was there.”

“Oh, you didn’t compete?” 

“No, I’m taking a break from skating for the time being.” 

“That sucks, man. Have you ever competed in it? I mean, the- what the hell is it called again- the Grand Prix? No, that’s Nascar,” Sam furrowed his brows, contemplative. 

“No, you’re right, it’s the Grand Prix Series. I’ve competed in the series since I was fifteen, and before that I competed in the Juniors division,” he slid his can back and forth across the tray. 

Sam laughed nervously, “I’m sorry, man, I only know a tiny bit about skating. I try my best to listen when my wife talks about it, but half of the words go in one ear and out the other. I just hate having nobody to talk to on planes, my wife is usually here.” 

“It’s fine,” Yuri said, making eye contact and smiling, “I get it.”

“So…” he looked like he didn’t know where to go next, “have you ever been in the Olympics?” 

“Um, yeah.”

“Oh- wait, didn’t…?” Sam worked his mouth into a thin line, “huh… wait… didn’t you win gold? Last- this year? Peonyung? P…”

“Pyeongchang? No- that, uh, I didn’t medal at all. It was another Yuuri. Yuuri Katsuki. I’m Yuri Plisetsky,” and at the deepened creases in Sam’s forehead, “I know, it’s confusing for us too.”

“I’m sorry about that! Not medaling, I mean.”

_ I don’t think he recognizes me,  _ he thought, just a beat too early. 

“Wait! I swear I’ve seen you before... my wife loves you! You and the other Yuuri and some guy named Viktor Nir...Neerofifov... are her favorites. She calls you guys some ridiculous nickname, can’t remember what it is. Would you- would you mind taking a picture with me? She won’t believe I sat next to you on this flight.”

“Sure,” Yuri got a lot better at interacting with fans once the ridiculous spike of hormones during his senior debut left him. 

“Thanks, man, she’ll really appreciate that. That’s crazy, though. You’re a skating legend or something. Oh, hey, y’know what? I remember her telling me that you would be taking some time off from skating, she was practically bawling. Said that you were too good and young to retire, and then something about how she’ll shoot someone if Feltsman turns into Two-berries? It’s all a lot of words and Russian I don’t understand.”

“I think she might’ve been talking about my coach Yakov,” he pointed to the snoring man, “and how she hopes he won’t turn into another coach, she’s named Tutberidze. Almost all of her girls peak early and then retire at seventeen.”

“Hmm,” Sam hummed, and that was the end of their conversation. 

Yuri slid the window blind open once again. The endless clouds were gone, replaced by sparse forest and a setting sun. He’d always loved red-eye flights because of the lights dotting the black expanse below; he would press his face up against the glass, ignoring the off-white window frame in his periphery, and pretend he was in space. It was easy to pretend- to get lost in the vast emptiness of the universe. Something about it was so comforting. 

There were no glowing webs beneath the plane as it flew east- they were flying over some rural area of Canada. Something was aching, but what was it? His mind spilled over into TV static, buzzing in time with the rapid beating of his heart. The clear acrylic pane was cool underneath his burning fingers. The jet hummed. 

A tear slipped out of his eye. He blinked in surprise, wiping it away with his left hand. The water pooled in the crease between his fingernail and nail bed. The lights in the cabin dimmed to almost nothing, lit up only by the occasional overhead lamp or computer screen. 

Another tear escaped- then another, then another. The slow, steady drip of a broken faucet. How many hours had it been since he’d opened the window blind, since he was left alone in his own empty head? 

Something was aching; it was him, he realized, still watching the velvet black. He wished they would pass over a city, or at least a town. The darkness slowly enveloped him, until he couldn’t even tell the expanse of his own mind from the landscape underneath. 

He didn’t dream of anything. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god I am such a stupid fuck. I completely absolutely forgot to post this chapter and I DESPERATELy hope that I can do this instead of having to re copy and paste the whole goddamn shit I am such a stupid idiot dumbass.  
>  im proud of this chapter and I hope you like it!


	6. Wednesday, October 24th, 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW suicide attempt ment, alcohol abuse (relapse)

“Why?”

_ He kept hiccoughing. It jarred him every time, and it was starting to be painful.  _

_ Jesus, he thought, slamming down the bottle with a heavy hand, what a pathetic loser. Warmth seeped through his sleeve. He looked down. His hand was bleeding, but he couldn’t figure out what it was from. He tried to lift up his arm, but it didn’t work. He laughed.  _

_ “Yura!” _

_ Somebody found him.  _

_ "Oops!” he giggled, “you fucking-”  _

_ “Yura- Yura. Oh no no no no-” _

_ “I’m sorry,” Yuri said- and he was. He was sorry.  _

_ "It’s okay.” _

_ Warm, rough hands caressed his cheek. He was sitting on something warm and soft. He was crying. He didn’t feel whole, like he thought he would have. Something still pulled at his chest.  _

_ “No,” he said, “no, it’s not.”  _

The wind picked up speed.

“Why? I don’t fucking know, Vitya.”

“I’m not- listen, Yura, I’m not mad at you. You didn’t… do anything wrong. I just need to understand. Please help me understand,” Viktor pleaded with him. 

The whole situation was a bitter echo of that last day in St. Petersburg, when Viktor confronted him by the Neva. They were standing on Viktor’s balcony, coats and scarves layered against the windchill and soon-to-come biting rain, facing forward. It was once again an accusation. Yuri was once again in the wrong. 

“You  _ should  _ be mad at me! I fucking broke my promise! I told you all that I would never do it again and then I went and- and- and fucking did it!” He slammed his fists against the rail. 

“I’m not,” Viktor’s voice was far too soft, “I’m not. We all make mistakes, okay? You’re allowed to make them once in awhile. As long as you don’t start- start- binge-drinking every day and doing hard drugs on the weekends then it’s okay. It’s okay to make a mistake.”

“Jesus, what the hell has gotten into you? All this  _ we all make mistakes  _ shit, when two years ago you would’ve been laying into me just as hard as Yakov?”

“Yakov wouldn’t lay into you for this. He knows you don’t need it,” Viktor sighed. 

Yuri looked at the street below. It was empty and dark. 

“I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. You know this, Yura. When I was younger, I wouldn’t forgive other people their mistakes because I wouldn’t forgive myself. How could I bring myself to do it?” he shook his head, “I’m becoming happier. Everyday is an uphill battle.”

Yuri allowed himself a spare second of thought for the prescription bottles that used to line Viktor’s sink. Orange plastic, Viktor’s name printed on the top of the label and then a string of incomprehensible words below that. The blood that he’d helped Mila clean up off Viktor’s bathroom floor- when he’d asked her what the blood was from, she said Viktor slipped and fell getting out of the shower. Two months later, the bottles no longer lined Viktor’s sink, and instead Yakov would shake a pill or two out of them and give them to Viktor at the rink. The week before that change, Viktor wasn’t at practice. 

The shadows painted beneath Viktor’s eyes- the smile that Yuri always reviled for looking so fake- the frequent absences- the hollow way Viktor spoke. Yuri was too young to understand, to happy to understand. Viktor was always so nice to him, even if they were never really friends. He could sometimes hear the muffled, shouted arguments between him and Yakov. Then Viktor left. 

“You-”

“I’m surprised it took you this long,” Viktor laughed, but it wasn’t happy, “I thought Mila would’ve told you. Thank you, by the way, for cleaning up my bathroom so nicely.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m getting better. It’s taken awhile, but I am. I know where you are. Maybe not exactly, but I’ve felt the same thing... only I never had much of a cause. I just felt so  _ lonely _ , being up there, looking down- and not even just that. I just didn’t want to fight for anything anymore. I don’t want you to have to feel the same way for as long as I have. I wish, more than anything, that I could wave a magic wand and  _ poof  _ you okay again. But I can’t. The least I can do is just help you up that hill. Help you avoid the same rocks that tripped me and sent me tumbling back down again,” Viktor shifted to face him, “beating yourself up for tripping just leaves you more time at the bottom. You need to brush yourself off and get back up again. And if you need somebody’s help for that, there’s no shame in it, okay?”

Yuri nodded, looking away from the St. Petersburg skyline and into Viktor’s grey-blue eyes. They almost blended in with the clouds. 

Viktor’s face was wan and his mouth pressed into a grim line- Yuri was sure he echoed something similar. There was something so intrinsic that connected them, he thought, and he was just disappointed that it had to be something that neither of them wanted. This seemed to be a common theme as of late in his life: the unwanted. He thought back to-- 

Viktor pulled him into a hug. Between the two of them and the winter in Piter, it was freezing cold. Yuri’s phone chimed, and he ignored it. 

“We should go back inside,” Yuri said, pretending his voice wasn’t thick with the oncoming rain. 

Viktor held him tighter. 

“We should.” 

**moron**

yuri

yuri

yuri

chatte! 

go shit yourself

what do you want

are you going to be at skate   
canada

no

yakov said that going to   
skate america ‘destabilized’   
me or something

:-( that sucks lmao

nhk or rostelecom?

yeah probably   
since it’s in russia so it’s  
fine

for rostelecom

idk about nhk bc japan  
is also pretty familiar to me  
but yakov still might not let  
me go

i’ll see you at rostelecom  
and maybe nhk then 

if u were coming to skate  
canada then you could have  
hung out with me and izzy!

i have no interest in hanging  
out with your wife

she’s crazy, jean

she’s cool you just need to  
give her a chanceeee

i gave you a chance and  
that’s about as many chances  
as i have for people with the surname  
leroy. sorry but no. 

her last name is still yang

wow lol pussy

hey i respect women

unlike you 

if you knew mila as well as i do  
you would know women deserve  
just as little respect as men

equal opportunist, i see?

yeah

can’t be sexist if i hate men too

that’s the most d  
r/im14andthisisedgy shit ever

i don’t know what that means

get a reddit account

isn’t reddit that nazi shit?

no that’s 4chan

4 chan? jesus this is so confusing  
everything has numbers. 9gag  
4chan 8chang 8gag 1gig what the  
fuck

please act like normal human

xD i’ll show you when i come  
to russia

ill also show u reddit

i really like haning out on the  
figure skating sub   
it’s super funny sometimes

[screenshot]

[screenshot]

‘i swear i heard that plisetsky is  
taking a break from skating bc  
he knocked up babicheva….  
is that actually not true?’

that’s…. 

are they retarded?

some of them for sure

this one’s my favorite:  
‘yuri plisetsky is addressing the  
issue of yuri plisetsky. congrats yuri  
plisetsky!’

what does that even mean?

it’s some stupid ass meme 

i have no idea i’ve only seen it  
like twice

i’m going through your name on  
twitter now

oh dear god no

not the pits

that’s where fans go to fester

here’s one:   
maria | fuck da ISU, user   
‘yurisyuuris’ on twitter says:  
‘angels: i miss yuri sm   
yuri: i’m still here  
angels: sometimes we can still hear his  
voice’

bleugh

i feel like i should make an sns  
post just to calm the rabid girls  
down

im honestly so surprised nobody  
recognized u at skate america

you were sitting like, right there

i have glasses and short hair  
now

of course nobody recognized me

i am a little surprised tho  
those girls are so desperate for  
a date

maybe the russian ones but the   
majority of the english-speaking   
crowd are lesbians and they will  
be disappointed about your   
haircut

lesbian? what the hell does   
that say about me then?

it’s common knowledge that  
you look like a lesbian, yuri.   
people have made entire accounts  
based on the fact. one time i   
encountered someone whose user  
name was ‘lesbian yuri   
plisetsky’ and i swear to you i never  
fucking recovered

jesus

as if i would TOUCH a woman

[image]

okay that doesn’t count mila’s a  
lesbo so i know she’s safe

but i mean you’re a lesbian  
too

your wife’s a lesbian

your mom’s a lesbian

yeah i know she fucked your mom  
last night

how does it feel to have a cuck for  
a father?

not as bad as one might think

make an sns post please please  
please please please

huh?

i liked a post that says ‘where is   
yuri plisetsky?’ and now people   
are accusing me of stealing you 

oh jesus.

fine

**Юрий Плисецкий** ✓ @yuriplisetskyofficial _24/10/18  
_

Guys calm down I am alive. Just chill out please. Jean Jaques Leroy is not harboring me. I am still in St. Petersburg. Thank you.  
[selfie]

> > **maria | fuck da ISU** @yurisyuuris _24/10/18  
>  __replying to_ _@yuriplisetskyofficial  
>  _
> 
> SHORT HAIR/????? GLASES????????? BOY…… you…….  
>  i’m considering heterosexuality……
> 
> > **Юрий Плисецкий** ✓ @yuriplisetskyofficial _24/10/18  
>  __replying to_ _@yurisyuuris_ _and_ _@yuriplisetskyofficial  
>  _
> 
> please don’t
> 
> > **Jean-Jacques Leroy** ✓ @jj_a_leroy _24/10/18  
>  __replying to_ _@yurisyuuris_ _and_ _@yuriplisetskyofficial  
>  _
> 
> how callous, yuri. this is why i’m married and you aren’t. also u spelled my name wrong
> 
> > **Юрий Плисецкий** ✓ @yuriplisetskyofficial _24/10/18  
>  __replying to_ _@jj_a_leroy_ _,_ _@yuriplisetskyofficial_ _and 1 other  
>  _
> 
> see now here i thought it was because i’m 17

**stupid hoe** @tripleaxelbebe _24/10/18  
_

since fucking when have plisetsky and leroy had BANTER???

> > **krusty krab klub** @alinaszagitova _ 24/10/18  
>  _ _ replying to  _ _ @tripleaxelbebe  
>  _
> 
> idk but i am LIVING for it. i never thought i’d see the day they get along
> 
> > **anya !! bts au** @sweetheartmyg _24/10/18  
>  __replying to_ _@alinaszagitova_ _and_ _@tripleaxelbebe  
>  _
> 
> i always thought they were fucking on the dl and nobody talked about it. u deadass   
>  telling me they hate each other?
> 
> > **stupid hoe** @tripleaxelbebe _24/10/18  
>  __replying to_ _@sweetheartmyg,_ _@tripelaxelbebe_ _, and 1 more  
>  _
> 
> ANYA LDKJFLSFJ YOU ARE SO STUPID

**moron**

fank you so much

PLEASE stop with the ‘fanks’ shit  
you aren’t british and you never  
will be

**Jean-Jacques Leroy** ✓ @jj_a_leroy _24/10/18  
_

@yuriplisetskyofficial fanks luv xx

> > **Юрий Плисецкий** ✓ @yuriplisetskyofficial _24/10/18  
>  __replying to_ _@jj_a_leroy_
> 
> choke

**moron**

you’re competing in nationals right?

yep

why

just wondering  
what do u have planned for ur   
exhibition skate? i’m strugglign  
and need inspo

i don’t have an exhibition skate  
planned

why 

it’s kind of unlikely that i’ll medal

idk man u should probably set   
one up anyways

idk maybe

sia is a banger  always

do a sia song for exhibition skate

i’ll do one too

people will go apeshit over it

r u trying to get us shipped?

yuri it would be so funny

would it really

i feel like ur wife would have  
something different to say about  
the situation

aw she knows you’re not a threat

it’s fine

yeah lol okay whatevs

speaking of sia katsuki just  
sent me an email and recommended i  
do sia for my exhibition skate  


see!

From: katsudonbowl@mail.yahoo.co.jp  
CC/BCC:   
To: tigriski@hotmail.ru  
**cool song ☭**

FOund a very cool russian song the other day! Very coll! IC3PEAK is the artist and its either one or two people. Girl has very long hair. Here's the limk:

[ https://youtu.be/zf99kdFw9b8 ](https://youtu.be/zf99kdFw9b8)

make sure to listen!! ir's good mysic.

-love, Yūri

p.s. tell mila to straighten that free leg. she wont be able to hear me. oh never mind yakov just screamed at her

p.p.s. (haha peepee) should we plan for gala skate? there'z that one somg you like by lorde. but those are kind of depressing. you listen to so much depressing music. sia is less depressing bjt still depressing enough for u, you hould check her out. her music kinda bangs

Sent from my iPhone

From: tigriski@hotmail.ru  
CC/BCC:   
To: katsudonbowl@mail.yahoo.co.jp  
**Re: cool song ☭**

what the fuck

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bruh while writing this I completely forgot that the first and second half of this chapter take a completely different tone. uh. so have a little break from the sad shit, I guess? anyway,. 
> 
> not leaving a long note because I want to get back to reading this one banger ass fic im in the middle of


	7. Wednesday, November 7th, 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW none

The ice hit Yuri hard, ripping at his exposed skin and dampening his clothes. He never used to fall this much, right? He couldn’t remember.

He pushed himself up, wincing- not in pain, but at the expression of disappointment that Yuuri wore. He paused the music-  _ Bessima  _ from the ballet adaptation of  _ Diderot and Other Fallacies _ \- and Yuri sighed. He’d thought that Yuuri might be a more forgiving critic than Yakov. He was not. Sure, he didn’t yell, but hearing the exact same things that Yakov told him but  _ meaner  _ and in an even, flat tone, was almost worse. 

“Your problem is that you’re going into the jump with too little speed. Your body recognizes that, so you’re trying to do some weird move,” Yuuri mimed Yuri’s entrance, twisting his leg to the side slightly and bending over in the opposite direction, “to try and make up for it, then you overbalance to make up for that, so you end up looking like some kind of human hyperboloid. Then you fall. You look worse than a novice.”

Yuri balked. 

“Pick up more speed. C’mon, aren’t you the same guy that said he was gonna ratify the quad axel? Let’s see you do it, then.”

Getting himself up, Yuri muttered, “ _ I don’t even know what a hyperboloid is,”  _ but got into position anyways. 

He launched into the beginning of the song.  _ Bessima _ was the last musical piece of the ballet, long and arduous and horrifying in its entirety. He was skating the last movement, the climax- then a couple of seconds of heartbreaking falling action. He loved it.

Inhibeus and his brother, Sedibus, had been fighting against each other for the entirety of the play- neither was good, neither was bad, they were just slave to their own nature. Foiling each other, over and over, all because their mother- Fate herself- chose to design them that way. 

_ Born in the scorching womb of two colliding stars, a pair of brothers, children of Fate. Sedibus, the enforcer, the catalyst of Fate’s will, and Inhibeus, the rebel, the inhibitor of Fate’s will. As different as day and night, the two together were destructive. _

Midway through the ballet, Fate came down to Earth, where the brothers had to stay for a millenia, disguised as a woman named Bessima. Bessima was hideous in appearance, but kind and true at heart, and the brothers both fell for her. They chased her in circles, but she never submitted herself to either of them. It was at the beginning of the piece  _ Bessima  _ that they realized that she had been their terrible mother all along, and they spend the first movement agonizing over their options and struggling to reconcile this pure woman with their mother, whom they both hated. In the second movement, they conspire to kill her, the first time in the entire ballet that they agree with each other. In the third, they give chase- a reprise of their previous pursuit, the jaunty romantic tune now drawn out, dissonant, marred by the high shriek of the violins and the low warnings of the bass. 

It ended with her death- the choir shrieking  _ Bessima! Bessima! Occidisti illi eam!  _ Then the choir faded, the strings, the brass, only two voices singing in harmony- two male sopranos, pure and clear, as the brothers folded into each other and died. 

His triple axel was placed late in his short program- right when the last blaring horn cut off. He took off while the tuba still sung, and landed to a world desolate, where all the brothers had were each other. It was the death of Fate, of Bessima, before the brothers turned to each other, blood staining their arms, and danced. That was how the play ended- an unconventional  _ pas de deux,  _ then a dramatic fall, and  _ fin.  _

“No, no- you look like you’re skating, not dancing. You need to  _ dance. _ ”

“I need to focus on  _ one goddamn thing  _ at a time is what I need to do! I’ll dance later, once I’ve got this stupid fucking axel down!”

“Okay, fine, let’s work on the axel out of context then. Go drink some water or something, I’m calling Madame Baranovskaya.”

Yuri groaned, “no. Please. You’re a decent enough ballet teacher.”

“Decent isn’t good enough, Yura. What, you think that the performers in the Mariinsky were taught by  _ decent  _ teachers?’

“I’m not a performer in the Mariinsky! I’m a goddamn figure skater!”

Yuuri tutted, pulling out his phone, “at least let me bring in Minako. She’ll be in town soon anyways. Besides, I don’t have time to teach you ballet on top of these extra sessions.”

Yuri had forgotten that Yuuri was still competing this season, and had his own obligations to attend to. He tried to push away the sudden wash of guilt with the metallic tang of water. 

“Fine.”

“What are you doing for your exhib skate?” Yuuri asked, arms crossed over the boards.

“Um,” Yuri scratched the back of his hand. He hated how much it itched when his blood pumped, “Lorde?”

“But she’s so  _ depressing. _ ”

“My life is depressing. Besides, there’s a song that- I mean, it means a lot to me, and I think it’d reflect how I’ve been feeling lately.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Let me play it for you,” he said, grabbing his phone and capping his water bottle. Yakov didn’t allow phones on the ice- it was dangerous if you dropped it, and even more dangerous if you didn’t look where you were going- but Yakov wasn’t here right now. 

He pressed play and settled back, watching Yuuri’s face carefully for his reactions. 

Yuuri wasn’t a big fan of Yuri’s so-called  _ depressing sad boy music,  _ but at least he wasn’t listening to My Chemical Romance anymore.  _ That  _ was a time. (Not a good one.)

The music took awhile to swell, the pulsating buzz, the layered vocals bouncing back and forth and raising in pitch, and then Lorde’s voice cut into it. The kick drum in the background forming a steady, unchanging beat. Yuri internally cheered when Yuuri started bobbing his head when the synthesized claps started in. A bittersweet smile formed on Yuuri’s face, the corners flicking up but his eyes drooping slightly. 

_ This dream isn’t feeling sweet,  _ and he was close enough that he could hear the minute hitch in Yuuri’s breath,  _ we’re reeling through the midnight streets,  _ Yuuri cocked his head,  _ and I’ve never felt more alone, it feels so scary getting old,  _ Yuuri looked at him, and he  _ understood.  _

_ Yuri collapsed on the bed, exhausted and world-weary after that run with Yuuri. Sure, it was the off-season, but that didn’t mean he had any right to be as out-of-shape as he was. Or that Yuuri had any right to be as in-shape as he was. _

_ Something unpleasant settled underneath his ribcage- a sour sort of feeling, a clear bright twanging. He didn’t like it at all. Other than the strange feeling by his diaphragm, he felt cleared out- like someone had taken to his meat with a spoon and scooped out everything of substance. He was just an empty skin sack. He wasn’t sure if the tremor in his hand as he raised his phone over his head was from the exertion of the run or something more psychosomatic. He hoped it was the former.  _

_ His phone dinged. He didn’t have the energy to engage in a spirited conversation with anyone. He brushed his eyes over the notification, anyways, and thanked god that it was from Leo. Leo and he didn’t speak. They just sent each other music recommendations and then never spoke at all. Their chat history was something of envy. They didn’t even have each other’s phone numbers, they just DMed each other on Instagram. _

**_leodliglesia_ **

_ listen to this. rec’d by a friend. (listen  
_ _ to all her music, it’s stunning.) _

_ [ _ [ _ https://open.spotify.com/track/0TEekvXTomKt3hdXDZxxeW?si=Pdyv2gJISuy7ASPE6vepIw _ ](https://open.spotify.com/track/0TEekvXTomKt3hdXDZxxeW?si=Pdyv2gJISuy7ASPE6vepIw)   
_ Ribs  
_ _ Ribs, a song by Lorde on Spotify] _

_ He clicked on the link, not bothering to reply, and went searching for his earbuds. They were  _ somewhere,  _ right? He found them lodged firmly in between two expired double-A batteries and a visual dictionary. He really needed to start keeping track of them instead of stealing Yuuri’s expensive wireless headphones all the time- but then again, Yuuri’s headphones had  _ crisp ass  _ sound quality. And were noise-blocking.  _

_ After victoriously plugging them into his banged-up SE, he laid back on his bed and closed his eyes. He had ultimate trust in the music recommendations that Leo sent to him (even if Leo’s taste had been pedestrian at best back when they first started their little exchange) so he always liked to experience it to the fullest.  _

_ He’d heard of Lorde before, he swore, but wasn’t she old news? She was popular back when he was nine-ish, wasn’t she? While the music was good, it didn’t really match up to the quality Leo usually sent him, but then- the chorus. And then he was sinking into it, and he didn’t have a name for the sinking feeling that had risen from his diaphragm to his upper lungs, but he did have a whole song for it. Lorde understood him, he knew, very intimately. Lorde had felt the ultra-specific aching feeling that he felt every day. He already loved her.  _

_ It took no time for Pure Heroine to become his favorite album. He listened to it as he fell asleep, and he listened to it as he woke up, and he’d never felt so targeted in his life. He would never listen to anything else ever again.  _

_ (That last part was a lie, because two weeks later Sia showed up on his discover weekly, and then he had two queens of sad girl pop to listen to. He and Leo had their first ever real conversation over Lorde and Sia.) _

The music faded out, and Yuuri cut it off before it could loop again. 

“That was-” Yuuri put a finger to his lips, “I can tell why you like it so much. It’s very you. But are you sure that you want to share this with the whole world? It feels very… private. Sentimental.”

“I’m sure. Positive, even.”

“Well, then. Forget your axel, forget your short and your free. Let’s get this shit started tonight.”

And so they did.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a very short chap, but the next one is longer. this chapter was originally slated to be after the next chapter but I felt it worked better right here. 
> 
> Diderot and Other Fallacies is neither a real play nor a real ballet, nor does it have any music. Bessima is not a real song. I was hesitant to include a fictional piece of fiction but then I was like if Kubo can do it so can fucking i. 
> 
> D&OF is actually the name of a very, very old unpublished fic that I wrote for another fandom that for awhile I considered to be the crux of my writing career. (not that I have any careers aside from being a full-time student athlete) (that was a joke I am horrible at cross country) It has been sitting in my google docs for years and I keep thinking 'I need to change the names and rework this' but then i never do. it's also grievously unfinished. the plot of the ballet is actually different (but still loosely the same) from the plot of the real-life version of D&OF, but I wanted it to sound believably like a ballet and I hope I succeeded at that. I did actually borrow a direct quotation from prologue of D&OF, but that's it. I really need to turn it into something viable, because it's been like 3 years and I'm still proud of D&OF. but enough about an unfinished fic that it's unlikely any of you will ever lay your eyes on!
> 
> yuri does his exhibition piece to Lorde because, I f,ukcing love Lorde. her music targets me. it is targeted. I feel understood, perhaps to the point of it being a little disturbing, when I listen to her music. and the other night, I had this epiphany, I was listening to ribs, right, and I was like! holy shit, this is basically exactly what yuri is feeling in this fic! I am making him have his exhib skate be to ribs. so I did that, because I am the author and I have full creative license, and no I am NOT projecting onto Yuri, why would I ever do that. 
> 
> hope you like this chapter even though it's a little bit more stupid and short! the next chapter is already almost complete, so that should be up tonight or tomorrow. concrit is welcome, as are any comments and kudos!


	8. Friday, November 23rd, 2018

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: child abuse, child neglect, alcohol/substance abuse ment, death of loved ones

At some point in the interim between Skate America and the Rostelecom Cup, Yuuri Katsuki became Yuri’s de facto part-time coach. Yakov was still his coach, of course, but Yuuri seemed to be creeping in on the territory, and where Yuri might have once felt bothered by it, he felt only a quiet sort of satisfaction. 

And around the same time was when Yuri moved into the Katsuki household. It wasn’t permanent, but he needed to be out of Yakov’s home for the time being- Yakov and Lilia were making efforts to repair their strained relationship- and he didn’t want to move back into his old apartment. His drafty, empty, lonely apartment. 

“Yura!” 

Yuri looked up from the gift he was studiously wrapping; he didn’t celebrate Christmas, but Katsuki did. So he complied. The artificial tree was lit up ten times over, casting a soft technicolor glow over the living room. 

He would get to celebrate Christmas ("Christmas") twice this year, and Hanukkah once-- his mother and little sisters were going to be flying into town for New Year (the closest thing to Christmas that he actually celebrated), Katsuki was holding his little Christmas celebration with all of their rinkmates, and then there’d be Hanukkah hosted by Yakov. 

Viktor, despite not being Jewish himself, always approached Hanukkah with an excessive amount of zeal. It was tradition- Yakov would pretend he wasn’t that excited about sharing his culture with his skaters (children), Viktor would practically burn the kitchen to a crisp trying to make latkes, and Yuri would pretend to be annoyed by the old man’s over enthusiasm. 

“Yes?” he asked, sticking his tongue out as he smoothed out a piece of scotch tape. 

Viktor’s face filled up his field of vision. “It’s snowing, Yurochka! Come, come!” 

Oh, never mind the fact that Yuri had explicitly told every member of the household not to peek at the gifts, that didn't matter. 

He was dragged out onto the balcony, forced to stick his tongue out to catch snowflakes. It didn’t bother him as much as he pretended it did- the look on Viktor’s face was something of pure joy. They lived in Russia, and it had already snowed this winter, but Viktor was holding Yuri like he’d never seen the snow before. 

It was contagious, this childish elation of his, and Yuri caught it full-force. Despite the chill, he found himself with an ear-stretching grin. His heart hammered in a way it hadn’t for years- beating for happiness, not anxiety. 

“It’s snowing,” he said, somehow awe-struck, “it’s snowing.”

The snow caught the yellow lights of the balcony, glinting gold before disappearing into the dark night. 

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Viktor asked, grabbing Yuri’s upper arm, “it’s so beautiful. This is one of those things I live for. I hope the snow is blanketing the city when I wake up tomorrow.”

Yuri turned his face up to the sky. The snow left dots of cold water as it melted on his face. Despite himself, he hoped that the snow would cover every surface in gleaming white, too. He swept his eyes over the ceiling of clouds that he knew must have been there, and it might have been grey or it might have been blue, at some point, but right now it was black. And that was okay, he realized, that the sky always changed. That some days would be blue and some would not. 

Looking back inside, Mila and Misha and Yuuri were all puttering around the room, laughing convivially. Yuuri was making pirozhki, and Yuri had asked for them, but the smell only served to pull his heart back down into place, and then sink it down even more. It reminded him too much of his dedushka. 

Applying the past tense to Nikolai Plisetsky still made him want to retch. 

He closed his eyes, trying to re-assemble the parts of himself that had started to ooze away at the thought. Congealed back into a real person, he opened his eyes again. Viktor was looking away, still in awe of the snow. Still in love with life. 

Yuri wanted to feel like that. He looked into the apartment one more time, and he could picture his dedushka there. Making pirozhki, smiling, laughing, sinking into the holiday spirit even though it was a month too early and it was a holiday he’d never celebrated anyways. Though he smiled again, the corners of his mouth were weighed heavy with an undertone of sadness. If somebody looked at him just right, they would see his frown- like one of those holographic cards that people would get in museum gift shops.

At least he was doing both. 

“Yura? Are you okay?” 

Yuri looked away from the warm yellow glow, back to the balcony, and for once the dark didn’t feel too empty. The desaturated nuance of dark grey to even darker grey that made up the shapes of the city weren’t depressing. This was one of those moments- he knew- that he would remember for awhile. Even as the image would begin to fade, the wash of this peculiarly fuzzy feeling would live on. He would later, under a mismatched pile of blankets on the Katsuki’s overstuffed couch, remember to file this into his cabinet of emotional memories, right alongside that of Hasetsu. And later, he wouldn’t be staring at the lamp in his room, as he so often did, trying to dissect it. Trying to find where it shifted off to the left, inverted itself, cast itself in the wrong shade of shadow. 

He didn’t feel tired. Not as much as he usually did- not the bone-deep, unavoidable, disparaging exhaustion. Not the type that made him snap in anger,  _ real  _ anger, not the kind that made him stay in bed or the kind that made him want to die before he stepped foot on the ice. But he did feel sleepy, his eyelids sagging as his shoulders drooped, a pleasant haze- like steam from hot food- settling over his mind. It was something he hadn’t felt in awhile. 

But, still- “does it ever stop hurting?”

Because Yuri had never experienced the grief of death before that year. He’d been surrounded by it his whole life- his mother grieving for the death of his grandparents even as he was born, his dedushka grieving for the death of the babushka that Yuri had met but could never remember, his uncle, claimed by disease the same year the twins were born. 

He’d experienced the grief of loss, but that was a different sort of grief. He was sad, at first, worried- always asking his mother and then his dedushka  _ where’s Papa? Why isn’t he watching me skate? When is Papa going to get back? _ but then he became angry. At his mother and his father, when she neglected him in favor of the three-year-old twin girls, when his father’s final business trip never ended, when they bundled him over to his dedushka's house instead of just being good to him. He was angry at both of them, age seven to age sixteen, before he circled back to sad. With loss, the five stages of grief never really ended for him. He didn’t know if he’d ever reach acceptance. 

But the grief of death, that was something that had never touched him. Not until his dedushka. And he hadn’t known how to cope- not well, at least. He  _ didn’t  _ know how to cope, now that the bottles and pills and needles had been wrenched from his drunken grip. 

“Does  _ what  _ ever stop hurting?”

“Thinking of him.”

Viktor hummed. Yuri thought of graves and flowers, visiting the clean marble headstones with Viktor. A lantern that they lit together, and a ripped-off corner of Yuri’s mangy blanket.  _ Ksenia Nikiforov, May 1st 1964 - July 3rd 2003  _ and  _ Boris Nikiforov, August 18th 1962 - July 3rd 2003  _ and most horribly, wrenching terrible sobs from Yuri’s throat as soon as he was safe and alone,  _ Maxim Nikiforov, June 28th 2001 - July 3rd 2003.  _

Maxim would’ve been the same age as Yuri, just a couple months younger. A baby brother that Viktor never got to know. Somebody who could’ve been a person, had it not been for a careless night of revelry of a group of young twenty-somethings. Yuri would’ve liked to meet him, he told that to Viktor, and Viktor said that he would’ve liked to meet him, too. 

Fifteen years old and already on top of the world, he’d been too busy. He was _always_ too busy. 

It had no right to haunt Yuri as much as it did. 

“No. It won’t ever stop hurting. It will hurt less, and it will hurt less often, and one day, you might even go several years without it hurting. But then something will remind you of him, in just the wrong way- or maybe in just the right way, but at just the wrong time, and it’ll hurt like someone is ripping something out of you. You learn to think of him less, to think of the happy parts when you do think of him, but maybe you’ll see a car like his, or pass by his bakery, or see someone who looks like him from the back. You turn to say something to him, or you almost call after him, or you think,  _ I should show this to him,  _ and then it hurts all over again. But it won’t ever hurt as much as it does now. It won’t ever hurt as much as it did when it first sank in. It always gets better. You learn how to cope.”

“How do… how do you cope?”

“Ah… I didn’t, for a very, very long time. I don’t know what you think of how I used to be, but I was much, much worse before you came along. I was too young to hurt as much as I did. And for a long time, I fixed that by shutting down. Even happiness. But distance between you and the event fixes things. Surrounding yourself by family helps.”

_ “Hi, I’m Yuri Plisetsky,” Yuri announced, mentally reeling off the prepared introduction his dedushka had given him, “I’m nine years old, and I am your new rinkmate.”  _

_ His dedushka had worked hard for him to get here, sending him to a summer camp that stretched his finances, paying for so many things out-of-pocket- and then Yuri’s talent was recognized, and he was offered a subsidized coaching fee, and room and board, and he could move out and stop being a burden. He was only nine, but he knew a lot more than other people. He knew how much of a strain he was on his dedushka. _

_ The silver-haired man in front of him stilled, a blank expression on his face. But before the blankness, a series of contortions that looked like he was trying to demonstrate all of the complicated emotions that his dedushka would explain to him when he didn’t understand anything other than happiness and sadness and anger. But the man had settled on blankness, so Yuri didn’t think about all of the expressions that had fleetingly appeared a picosecond before.  _

_ The man looked a lot like what that one skater- Viktor Nikiforov- would look like if he had shorter hair and also looked a lot more tired. He did not look Yuri in the eye, which Yuri’s mother said was something he was supposed to do. It didn’t matter to Yuri overmuch, because he didn’t like making eye contact with strangers anyhow. Tired Viktor Nikiforov fixated on the left curve of Yuri’s chin.  _

_ “Okay,” Tired Viktor Nikiforov said, after a lot of quiet blankness. _

_ From Yuri’s right, a red-headed girl with a garish sequined top said, “don’t be rude, Viktor!” _

_ Yuri didn’t think that Viktor had been rude at all. Viktor said nothing more to the redhead, clunking out of the break room in his skate guards. Yuri turned to an effeminate man with dark brown hair and introduced himself to him. Something about Viktor’s tired eyes stuck heavy in his midbrain.  _

He had been silent for awhile, and so had Viktor. Gone was the elation of a couple minutes prior. Viktor’s face was solemn, but he didn’t have tired eyes. Yuri did not mourn the death of those. 

“Sometimes,” Viktor said, so quietly it could barely be heard despite the muffled streets, “sometimes, I look at you and I think- is this what he would have been like, if he’d lived?”

Yuri nodded mutely. 

“It hurts, sometimes. For awhile, I was hoping you could be him, for me. But it was an unfair thing to press onto a nine-year-old child. None of my grief should have been yours to bear. You did not deserve to become a stand-in for a child who just barely saw his third birthday. A child I never met. Grief makes you do crazy things,” Viktor sighed, and he was no longer answering Yuri’s question. 

“The worst part is the guilt. It will always be the guilt. Try not to get too deep into it, because you might never get out.”

Yuri didn’t say anything, just took two steps forward and wrapped his arms around Viktor. He tucked his head onto Viktor’s chest, ignoring how closely Viktor’s body approximated his father’s. The stubble that Viktor wore these days rasped against Yuri’s forehead. It didn’t feel like coming home. It felt like he was already there, and had only just figured it out.

_ Yuri, seven years old, too small for his age. His bones stuck out at his shoulders, elbows, knees, wrists, ankles. He was always jutting, and sometimes teachers would make jokes about young boys and their enviable metabolism. The nothing he had for dinner said otherwise. He was cold, always.  _

_ He understood why his mother sent him out. He was being a bother, nagging at her while she was trying to get his baby sisters under control. He understood that he was supposed to be quiet when his mother was upset, and that it was his fault, but he had been hungry. He was usually hungry. It made him angry that the twins got more attention than him, but still- he understood. _

_ Beneath him, the concrete step was biting and chilly, but he didn’t have clothing that was thick enough to ward off the seeping freeze. He looked around himself and wondered if Lyosha would let him stay at his house that night. Lyosha’s parents were always willing, and they always fed him. His mother didn’t. His father wasn’t home- wouldn’t be. Not for awhile.  _

_ His mother had screamed at him to leave and never come back, squalling babies forming an irritating score to her hysterics, but he knew that if he opened the door very quietly and stole into the coat closet, he could make the walk to Lyosha’s house. She never locked the door- Yuri didn’t know if it was from kindness, or ignorance. Either way, it was his saving grace. _

_ Valentina and Viktoria were still crying when he opened the door a crack, so she wouldn’t hear him. He stole his father’s felted wool coat from the closet, the warmest one there, and it smelled of him. Comforting and kind. His father was always kind, when he was around. Too bad he’d disappeared. The coat almost dragged on the ground when he put it on, and he knew he looked ridiculous, but he was cold. He didn’t have enough body fat to make it to Lyosha’s- nearly a kilometer away- with just his pajama pants and a threadbare T-shirt. He  _ would _ go to his dedushka’s, but he would have to call, because his dedushka lived four or five kilometers away.  _

_ Moscow was very cold, when he was seven years old. Cold and large.  _

_ “Yurochka, what are you doing out here in the cold?”  _

_ It was his papa! _

_ “I was bringing you your coat,” Yuri said, with all the authority of a seven-year-old who had no idea that his father was coming home. His father hadn’t been home since his mother’s birthday, in June. That was four months ago- Yuri counted. What was he doing home now? _

_ “Thank you, Yura, but I don’t need it anymore. See, I’ve got a new one?”  _

_ Yuri regarded the new coat with baleful eyes. Instead of navy blue, it was tan. He didn’t like it as much, it suited his papa less. It was a different material, too, fuzzier. It looked thinner. He didn’t want his papa to freeze- he was already so cold, and he was wearing a far thicker, larger coat. His papa must have been even colder.  _

_ “I see you don’t like it?” his papa scooped him up, and Yuri tucked his head into his papa’s neck, giggling at the feeling of stubble. His papa smelled nice, sharp and warm at once, not the grainy flat perfume of cigarettes that his mother wore and draped the house in.  _

_ “No, the blue is better. Blue is a better color than tan!” _

_ “You’re right, which is why you get to keep the blue coat! My Yurochka can only have the best,” his papa said, and Yuri nodded.  _

_ “Papa, can you take me with you?”  _

_ “Ah, Yura, I’m afraid I can’t,” he felt papa frown, “it isn’t safe for you to be where I’m going. But your mama can take good care of you, right?” _

_ “Mama doesn’t give me food! She just yells at me about the twins. She had me go out, so I was going to go to Lyosha’s to see if he’ll let me get food.” _

_ His papa sighed, rubbing Yuri’s back, “I will talk to my papa, your dedushka, and see if he will let you stay there, alright? Your mama isn’t doing well, you must understand.” _

_ Yuri sniffed, nodding. He wished his papa could stay forever, but he understood. He was a big boy.  _

_ He always understood- more than adults wanted him to, he knew. Sometimes his mama would try and spell things out to other adults, but Yuri was very good at spelling. He understood that sometimes his mama was being mean because she was tired and the twins were being mean, so he shouldn’t cry or be loud. He hadn’t cried that night, nor had he been loud, but she had been trying to feed the twins and get them under control and he kept tugging at her sleeve until she yelled at him. He didn’t even cry then. Because his mama wasn't doing well, he had to understand. _

_ But he cried as his papa packed up his clothes and draped him in the oversized navy-blue coat and dropped him off at his dedushka’s. Why couldn’t his papa just take Yuri with him? _

_ “Goodbye, Yurochka, I love you very much. Don’t forget that.” _

_ “Goodbye, papa,” he’d murmured, half-asleep in the cot in his dedushka’s spare room. He watched as his papa kissed him goodnight, ever-present stubble rough against his temple, and then watched as his papa walked out of the room. He seemed so small in the golden light of the doorway. Yuri wished he would turn around, so he could see his face. _

_ Then his papa left for the last time. _

Muffled laughter from inside. A car passed- two, three streets down. The hole in Yuri’s chest widened, but it didn’t sting from the cold. He tightened his hold on Viktor. Viktor returned his ferocity in kind. 

As if possessed by his own mind, he lifted a hand up to Viktor’s cheek. Viktor let him rub his fingers over his chin, and Yuri did not look up from where he was. It would break the illusion, and he had always loved play-pretend.

“You should keep it like this all the time,” Yuri muttered, and he supposed that this must look very strange from Viktor’s perspective. After all, he’d never met Yuri’s father. He wouldn’t know. But Yuri didn't talk about him, so he figured that Viktor must have figured out that there was something going on there. Something that he shouldn't press on about.

But something was sitting in place of his heart, squashing his intestines and lungs, digging blunt claws into his liver and pressing uncomfortably close to his ribs. It was a large, cancerous growth, both emptying him out and making his skin uncomfortably tight. His body stretched taut over a frame it was never meant to cover, while the monster drank his blood and worked at the meat of his body with a spoon. He couldn’t breathe. The thing in his chest was taking up more and more space, squeezing up into his trachea and down to his pelvis, expanding outwards and upwards and inwards and he was dying. 

He couldn't feel himself for a moment, couldn't feel anything but the painful tumor elbowing his vital organs out of the way, couldn't feel anything but pain. He had been so happy just minutes before, but he was a professional at ruining good things. 

Viktor tightened his hold on Yuri. He wished he could be seven again. 

He registered coming slowly back into his body, feeling the blood slowly trickly back to his extremities. His lungs pushed and pushed at the monster in his chest, beating it back until it was smaller, just a few sizes bigger than his heart. It started to scoop at his insides again. Hollowing him out until every thought echoed unpleasantly in the cavern of his torso. 

He thought about the old navy blue coat, and how it was sitting in his closet, but it didn’t smell like his papa anymore. It no longer felt like a reminder. Anger collapsed under sadness and he  _ missed  _ him, he missed him so much it hurt. His father was a good man, he’d never curse or scream or cry at Yuri, he’d never lay a hand on him. Why did he leave? He never got a chance to ask his dedushka, because he spent most of his time decidedly pretending that his father did not exist and never existed, and then his dedushka had died. 

But standing there, wrapped up in Viktor’s embrace, where he was  _ so much  _ like his father- the same fatherly smell, the days-old stubble, the tall and muscular form- he couldn’t very well pretend anymore. All he could do was feel, and feel, and try and accommodate the new rush of emotions in his admittedly shallow well of emotional capacity until they overflowed and threatened to spill. 

They pricked at his tear ducts and pushed up against his ears, tried to force their way out of his nose and mouth and pores. He was straining to keep them in, and his throat was aching with the effort. 

For all that he tried not to, though, he felt every bit as small as he did at seven years old, on the streets of Moscow, enveloped in the last embrace his father ever gave to him. Just an abandoned little boy, tripping over the hem of his father’s coat, trying to make his way to Lyosha’s. Still a boy who believed that his father would return to him once more. Not a seventeen-year-old, run ragged by everything the universe had thrown at him, who had a taste of the top of the world and the bottom of hell. It choked at him.

But he was a big boy then, and he was a big boy now. And he knew that his mama would be upset if he bothered her with his crocodile tears. 

Yuri did not cry. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a pretty heavy chapter that completely ran away from me. it was meant to be, like, yuri realizing that things could be good at the same time as they were bad, and it was a fairly short chapter that just, like, every time I revisited it I was like 'I need to expound more on this' or 'I can't just leave this lying here' and it steadily got longer and longer. and sadder and sadder. I swear this wasn't supposed to be as sad or as heavy as it ended up being.
> 
> anyways, now into an unnecessary explication of all of my authorial and narrative choices regarding the characters:
> 
> I know it seems sort of like a plot hole but yes, Yuri's mother is visiting him for Russian New Years. despite moving from her home, and falling out of contact for awhile, she contacted him via his grandpa a year or so before his grandfather's death in an attempt to try and repair some of the damage she did to him. their relationship is Extremely rocky but I'm not gonna expand much further because there will be a chapter highlighting her visit. 
> 
> yuri still loves his father very much, and misses him a lot, despite his father's shortcomings and abandonment. originally I was going to have his father be a horrible, terrible, mean person that yuri holds nothing but hatred for but then I figured it would be sadder if his father was actually a very kind and caring person that just wasn't very present (for reasons that we may or may not discover later on) and also I am very terrible at writing terrible fathers because I hold nothing but love and respect for my own and in order to write a character effectively I have to be able to put myself in their shoes. and sometimes I cannot do that very easily. 
> 
> as for viktor and Viktor's family: I've seen a lot of fics where Viktor's parents died when he was young, but then I thought, what if he also had a younger brother? that died? I don't see a lot of fics where viktor also has a deceased sibling, and I also thought it would be interesting to explore the angle of the deceased younger brother being roughly the same age as yuri. yuri feels exceedingly guilty over this, and has for a very long time, because viktor made it clear early on that he resents yuri for this fact. they've had many terrible arguments over it. viktor was not a good person for a very long time, but yuri still loves him because he grew up with mostly defunct parental figures and understands thoroughly that people are flawed and he can still love them despite this. 
> 
> fun fact! in the original version of Yuri's backstory in my head, he had a good relationship with his mother and never knew his father because his father died shortly after his younger sisters were born, but then I decided that having abandonment issues aligned more closely with his canon characterization (and, after all, this yuri is just a future version of canon yuri) so I had to do it to him :-( 
> 
> this chapter was. a Big Bad Boy to write and I am both proud of it and frustrated by it at once. if you aren't a writer it must seem weird to see these writers say that the fic just ran off without them but it really, truly does happen. sometimes it can be very frustrating to get the characters to do what you want them to do. I just write a sequence of events and then it can deviate from what it was originally supposed to be. the sad parts of this chapter were supposed to be there, but just, not as much. this is also, I think maybe my longest chapter yet? it's somewhere around 4000 words, I believe.
> 
> Yakov is jewish because, like, sure. why not.
> 
> in conclusion: guh 
> 
> anyways, for risk of writing a longer end note than the chapter itself, I will be done now! thank you so much for reading, concrit, comments, and kudos are welcome!


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